Blue light therapy is a prototype of simpler apps that I will be building in the future.
Blue Light Therapy iPhone App
Blue Light Therapy is a prototype app. It allows you to play with blue light to activate suprachiasmatic nucleus SCN within your brain. It is one of the few brain regions that receives input directly from the eye. Whether SCN is sensitive enough to iPhone screen light is unknown. Whether it works or not will be determined based on the user feedback. Until then it will stay as a free app that you can try to lift your mood or awaken your brain.
How to use the app
Simply set the timer to 3-10 minutes and star the app. The app will play music and animate ripples on a blue background. You can create your own ripples by moving your finger along the screen. Observe the ripples consciously and wait for the app to hide the screen. When the screen is hidden, you know that your session is complete.
By keeping consistent length sessions at consistent times of the day, you may help entrain your brain to a different daylight cycle length. This may sound like an odd thing to do, but for so many people whose lives are spent in pastel colored cubicles under dim artificial fluorescent light, the lack of blue light exposure may be quite a real threat, especially when the winter comes and it’s”Get up its dark, leave work, it’s dark”, and there’s no time to get exposure to open sky and sunlight.
Still image used for wave generation
Disclaimer
This app has not been extensively tested. It does not offer to treat, cure or diagnose any medical conditions. I’m offering it here as a free tool that I developed for personal use and hope that it may be beneficial to a small fraction of the general population.
If you experience discomfort after using the app, I would recommend discontinuing the use of the app.
As a reminder, always consult your healthcare practitioner before doing anything that may affect your circadian rhythms. Do not use this app in the later part of the day, before sleep or in the middle of the night. Doing so poses real dangers to your circadian rhythm, and thus your overall wellbeing.
More info: google SCN Blue Light
http://www.pnas.org/content/95/11/6097.full.pdf
Touching the screen creates ripples that bounce off the walls, producing all possible shades of blue!
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Ooops! Saw the sound button~that’s what brain injuries will do to you, or at least to me, sometimes can’t see what’s right in front of me????
Regards,
Steve
Retired MD, ABIM, ABFP
ABI/TBI SURVIVOR
Works great, but when listening to Pandora, and I have the music on, and no sound comes out when I start BlueLight.
Also when iPad 2 timer sounds off, cuts off music permanently thereafter BlueLight’s music will turn off.
Remedy is for me to turn iPad completely off, & restart it, then BlueLight works fine until another APP, mentioned above turns its sound on or off permanently.
An inconvenience. Annoying. A hassle to use then.
Why on earth does this app require a video camera to download?
That’s the easiest way to exclude earlier iOS devices from being able to download the app, because it was not tested on those devices. Without this, the app would simply crash.