Assistant Professor Karin Smolders (Human-Technology Interaction, IE&IS) is conducting research into the effects of light on the health, well-being and performance of people. She says that alcohol addiction is often accompanied by a disruption of the sleep-wake rhythm of addicts. “The biological clock is disrupted by the alcohol abuse, which contributes to the risk of a relapse in people with a chronic alcohol addiction after a detox treatment in a clinic”, Smolders explains. By installing special lamps in patients’ homes, by means of which the color and strength of the light can be varied, she wants to make it easier for these people to build up a regular sleeping pattern again, which helps them bring structure into their daily lives.

Intelligent lamps

“We replace the light bulbs in their light fixtures with intelligent lamps. For this purpose I am cooperating with Philips, which is making its Hue system available. The patients are going to complete questionnaires and keep diaries so as to chart their alcohol consumption and well-being during the intervention period. We are going to combine this with hormone determinations via saliva samples, which will allow us to establish the phase of the biological clock. In addition, patients will be wearing watches with motion sensors to monitor their sleep.”

Jean-Philippe Frimat from the Microsystems group of the Department of Mechanical Engineering has also received an Off Road subsidy. The Belgian postdoc is going to use it to try and keep pieces of brain tissue from epilepsy patients alive outside the body in the lab. This is the first step in the direction of ‘Brain-on-a-chip’, which will make brain research with ‘living’ human tissue possible outside the body. It is hoped that this undertaking can make an important contribution to the development of new medicines against epilepsy.