A Simple Wall lamp for creating dynamic lighting in hospitals patient rooms to administer chroma-therapy for improving comfort of patients going through chemotherapy or recovering from surgery and being able as care givers to serve them better.
I have always being interested in physiotherapy for patients in hospitals and finding ways to improve their mood and mental health. This is because encouraging patients to have a positive outlook is important for serving them while they recover. My mom is a physician and I wanted to think of interesting uses of technology to serve caregivers and patients by using light of different wavelengths to create positivie effects in the hospitals.
The device is a machine that changes the lighting of a room based on what the occupants of the room need. This type of Chromotherapy has been in existence since 2000 BCE when the Egyptians and hemetican Greeks had treatment sanctuaries with rooms of different colors which had different healing qualities 1. Of late, modern studies reported by the New York times and even MIT’s Richard J.Wurtman has shown that individual colors can treat premature babies of jaundice (30,000 children are treated each year instead of having dangerous blood transfusions), prevent black lung disease, improve work ability and even reduce aggression in violent juveniles 2.
The lamp was made using a wooden box painted white with a 3D printed geometric dog I designed. The lamp was meant to be minimalist but aesthetically pleasing and the 3D image can be anything depending on the preference of the user. IT just creates something nice to look at.
When I was prototyping, I placed the components haphazardly to do quick test runs. The picture below shows my rough set up while getting things ready.
To Run the device, you will need a Raspberry Pi and Sunfounder Sensor Kit.
From the sensor kit, we will only use the:
- RGB LED module
- LCD Display
- Relay Module
Additionally, you will need a UV lamp
For Software, you will need the python raspberry pi gpio modules, sensor kit modules and tutorials that can be found on sunfounder's website and tkinter
Open your raspberry pi terminal then type the following:
Update First
sudo apt-get update
Install Tkinter for Python3
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.5 python3.5-tk
Install gpio
sudo apt-get install rpi.gpio
Finding Sunfounder modules
These can be located on the (sunfounder tutorial website)[https://www.sunfounder.com/learn/category/sensor-kit-v2-0-for-raspberry-pi-b-plus.html]. Download the (sensor kit zip file)[https://www.sunfounder.com/learn/download/U2Vuc29yX0tpdF9WMi4wX2Zvcl9CX19SUGkyX2FuZF9SUGkzXy56aXA=/dispa] that has example python scripts and modules for running any important components incase you are interested.
I only used the LCD1602 module and you can find this in my src file and can copy and paste it to wherever you need to use it.
If you simply want to run the script without the hardware and see the GUI and the tkinter widgets, you can comment out the import modules at the top of the script relating to the GPIO and LCD1602 modules.
#import RPi.GPIO as GPIO - comment out using a hashtag
#import LCD1602 - comment out using a hashtag
The full GUI should look like this:
The Color Info Pages with information on the uses of each wavelength should look like this: