DESmart Lab

Sponsor: Edson Initiative for Dementia Care and Solutions

Team: Nina Sharp (PI), Jason Yeom (Co-I), Molly Maxfield (Co-I), Seonghyuk Son (RA), Ellen Zheng (RA)

Status: Active 

Summary

Therefore, the main objective of this project is to explore the relationships and effects of thermal and lighting conditions on comfort, cognitive performance, and physiological signals (heart rate, skin temperature, and pupil dilation) in older adults with mild dementia and to develop a non-invasive thermal and lighting environment control framework via the occupant’s physiological signals for an adaptive home care system.  

Methods

Study Design: Counterbalanced Crossover 

Tools: EmpaticaPlus, Joggle Research

Outcomes: Heart Rate Variability, Skin Temperature, Cognitive Perfomance 

The result will provide a new perspective to control the indoor environment for older adults while optimizing their cognitive performance. This project will create a broader societal impact across integrated research domains. New findings of this project can provide an optimum senior living environment, which will improve the older occupants’ satisfaction and cognitive performance. The outcomes, the smart human-centric indoor lighting and thermal environment predictive model, could also be used as a basis to develop personalized adaptive indoor environments for other building types, which will enhance the building occupants’ well-being and improve the general indoor environment quality of the buildings.