Carlos Royo, Healthcare Business Development Manager of GMV Secure e-Solutions, took part in the first TRANSFORMING LIGHTING, giving a paper on the healthcare consequences of lighting. After analyzing our current society’s upside-down age pyramid, he shared his experience as family physician and expressed his deep conviction about the worth of Big Data in research and healthcare applications.

Although, as he pointed out “I have not come across any published research on the positive healthcare effects of lighting (some on lighting and the working environment), I have been able to confirm it while working with patients”. In the current situation of life expectancy increasing year by year, after the birth of the “first Spanish person who will live for 140 years”, all possible resources now need to be brought to bear to make the health system sustainable. Because, up to now “not too many people had reached the age of 80”.

Bearing in mind the fact that “the last two years of anyone’s life accounts for 80% of his or her healthcare cost” and that the prolongation of life expectancy implies “chronicity of certain diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular or respiratory diseases” it is necessary to take any health-improving measures such as chromotherapy. Big Data “will enable conclusions to be drawn about the benefit of lighting on the basis of data provided by trailblazing treatment such as mood-enhancing chromotherapy”.

And if we observe that in Spain “only one percent of the healthcare expenditure is spent on ICTs”; if we factor in too that “by 2020 one third of the twenty billion connected handhelds will be giving data on our health”, it would seem only logical to conclude that healthcare-technology investments capable of analyzing real healthcare data would enable governments to implement public healthcare assurance measures. Small wonder, then, that a Harris Poll survey commissioned by eClinicalWorks, confirms that 78% of those using wearable devices/fitness trackers more than once a month feel it useful for their doctors to have access to that information.

Lighting in the teleconsultation

The Healthcare Business Development Manager shared the success story of a GMV-implemented teleconsultation system in Colombia’s telepsychiatry surgeries. He argued that “patients in an environment where they feel comfortable, in a warm ambience created by the right color and lighting, are more likely to open up and share with the specialist their inner world”.

TRANSFORMING LIGHTING brought together experts in innovation and new technologies, architecture and engineering in an event presented by the journalist Marta Robles and inaugurated by Mario Buisán, director general of Industry and SMEs of the Ministry of Economics and Antonio Garamendi, president of the Spanish Confederation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (CEPYME in Spanish initials).