Manchester Sleepy Screen Technology

Researchers unveil 'sleepy smart screen' technology.

19:19 28 June 2018

Scientists from the Universities of Manchester and Basel have unveiled a new technology they call ‘melanopic display’ designed to control the alerting effects of screen use. The technology regulates the amount of cyan light in images to either make phone insomniac fall sleep easier or help night workers to not fall asleep at a computer.

 

Conventional display is made up of red, green and blue primary colours, which match up with three types of photoreceptors in our eyes. The team added a fourth ‘primary colour’ or cyan. When the cyan light is turn up, it makes user feel more alert; when turned down, it makes users feel more sleepy.

 

Professor Rob Lucas, who led the team of researchers, said: This outcome is exciting because it tells us that regulating exposure to cyan light can influence how sleepy we feel. Our study also shows how we can use that knowledge to improve the design of visual displays. We built our melanopic display by adapting a data projector, but we would expect that this design could be applied to any type of display.”

 

He added: “Such displays could, for example, help phone obsessed teenagers to fall asleep, or support alertness in people who need to use a computer at night.