Researchers at Daimler AG are exploring how light impacts the well-being and performance of truck drivers by testing eight drivers for two weeks under different lighting conditions inside a truck’s cab.
The truckers alternated between driving for one week in a truck cab with conventional lighting and another week in a cab with a Daylight+ module that provides additional daylight inside the truck cab. The goal is to determine if applying additional daylight inside the truck cab will have a positive effect on truck drivers in order to boost awareness and safety.
With additional light, truck drivers not only performed better but also drove more economically. Source: Daimler The amount of light a human receives during the course of a day and the shift from day to night helps the internal clock and helps synchronize circadian rhythms. Lack of light is a serious problem for many people in countries in Northern Europe because it gets barely any light during the winter months and can result in poor mood, reduced performance and a lack of motivation, Daimler says. Light therapy has shown to be a standard method of treating these symptoms medically.
In the test, Daimler found that subjects improved significantly under the influence of an additional dose of light, regardless of time of day. Also, drivers with more daylight in the cab drove more economically. Drivers were only compared to themselves in the test, meaning the performance of the drivers was based on both how they performed without extra light and how they performed with the Daylight+ module running.
Drivers reported that not only was the additional light helpful during the darkest time of the year just before the winter solstice, but also that they perceived the space inside the cab to be more pleasant with additional lighting.
“When designing the series of tests, we hadn't even considered that the space might appear larger,” says Siegfried Rothe, from the Daimler research department.
Rothe says it will take several months to determine if the experiments will lead to any extensive changes in terms of designing cab lighting.
