Population Based Lighting Study on Older Adults

The ENLIGHTENme project aims at collecting evidence about the impact of outdoor and indoor lighting on human health and wellbeing through the development and testing of innovative solutions and policies that will also counteract health inequalities in European cities. In particular, through an open-online Urban Lighting and Health Atlas, ENLIGHTENme will collect and systematize existing data and good practices on urban lighting and will perform an accurate analysis on the correlations among health, wellbeing, lighting and socio-economic factors in three pilot cities: Bologna (Italy), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and Tartu (Estonia).

In this context, the ENLIGHTENme project will also include an interventional, multicenter, prospective, randomized, controlled, unblinded trial involving one target district, selected based on its artificial light characteristics, in the urban areas of each of one of the three pilot cities. Within each target district, a random sample of individuals aged 65 years or older (intervention group) will be exposed to modifications in domestic indoor lighting and compared with a control group, living in the same target district, unexposed to domestic electric light modifications. At the same time, in a specific area of the target district, outdoor lighting will be modified by the local municipal authority. The hypothesis to be tested in this study is that light interventions may improve individual physical and mental health by affecting circadian entrainment, sleep pattern, and mood. Thus, the study is aimed at providing evidence whether the planned change in electric light exposure at both urban public outdoor and domestic indoor lighting levels may impact on physical and mental health by improving photo-entrainment of circadian rhythms to the light-dark cycle