Circadian stimulus – A computation model with photometric and colorimetric quantities

Abstract

The circadian stimulus is an important, validated and updated metric that describes the invisible influences of light on the human circadian system explicitly and scientifically. However, an absolute spectral power distribution must be supplied for its computation, which is only measurable by an expensive and complicated spectrometer. This paper proposes an alternative circadian stimulus computation model that is identified as the function CS(z, E_v) for white light sources based on the most common and simplest parameters of illuminance E_v in lux and the chromaticity coordinate z. These parameters are well known and widely used in both colour science and lighting technology. In order to prove the accuracy and availability of the model, an internal validation was performed with the adapted method repeating split data to check the goodness of the model fit. The fitted model achieved a maximum residual of 0.058 in the circadian stimulus quantity (R²= 0.998). An external validation with the maximum residual of 0.030 (R²= 0.999) provided stronger evidence for the usability of the model in applications.