Control Unit for Phototherapy Sources

Bright-light therapy is one of the current techniques for preventing or supporting the treatment of several psychological disorders, such as seasonal affective disorder, bipolar disorder, postnatal depression etc. The paper deals with the design and realization of a control unit for phototherapy sources. General requirements on the control unit are specified and the principal approach to implement these requirements is described. Three different control unit designs are prepared for three specific devices - a light therapy chamber, a portable phototherapy device and a biodynamic lamp. The goal of the control unit is handling DALI LED controllers, wireless user communication and setting the therapy parameters up. The unit is realized as a simple embedded system equipped with the ESP-8266 or the WSP32-WROOM-32 microcontrollers. The system implements transmitting DALI commands and receiving the answers from the bus, user communication using the web based Graphical User Interface and therapy control. The specific implementation of the control unit for the phototherapeutic light chamber is described in more detail in the article. The design and implementation of the device were evaluated both in laboratory conditions and in real operation.