Investigation of human eye pupil sizes as a measure of visual sensation in the workplace environment with a high lighting colour temperature

Abstract

Among indoor environmental quality components, such as lighting, thermal, acoustic and spatial conditions, lighting quality is one of the significant factors that affect human environmental health and work productivity, especially as they pertain to human visual comfort and satisfaction. With the help of advanced sensing technologies, this study utilized a human body’s physiological principle to instantly react to its ambient environmental lighting condition to estimate a user’s visual sensation. Thus, this research investigated the possibility of using human eye pupil sizes as a measure of visual sensation in a workplace setting, especially in the high lighting colour temperature (5000 K) that is very common in modern office environments with the adoption of natural colour-fluorescent light bulbs. A series of experiments involving human subjects in an environmental chamber were conducted. Various ambient lighting conditions were generated to initiate and test pupil size changes and visual sensations. Statistical analyses of the collected data were conducted to help elucidate research findings. This research directed its focus toward pupil size change patterns as a means of assessing the human subject’s visual sensations, and to determine a potential use for this physiological principle in the control loop of a lighting system in a conventional workplace environment.