Sunlight Glasses Track Your Exposure

Human bodies are infuriatingly picky. Don’t put enough food in them and they’ll starve. Put too much food in them and they develop an increased risk of various health conditions. Sunlight is similar, as human body skin can burn and even develop cancer from too much exposure. But the human body needs some sunlight to synthesize vitamin D. There is also a great deal of evidence to suggest that sunlight plays an important role in human mental health and overall wellbeing. To help persnickety human bodies get the proper amount of sunlight, Dave Bennett developed these Sunlight Glasses.

Bennet developed the Sunlight Glasses after hearing about the importance of sunlight exposure from Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and host of the Huberman Lab podcast. Huberman and his podcast attract a great deal of criticism from the scientific community, with many experts raising the “pseudoscience” alarm. Huberman has even suggested that sunscreen is bad—a view that has obvious ramifications when it comes to skin cancer. But humans do need at least some sunlight and a lot of well-supported research backs up that idea. Bennett’s Sunlight Glasses can help people ensure they’re getting enough.

These glasses have a light sensor on the bridge, so they can constantly monitor the intensity of light that they’re receiving. Assuming that the user is wearing the glasses all day — or at least when they’re outdoors — that data should correlate with the amount of sunlight exposure the user gets. At night, they can perform the opposite function and tell the user if they’re getting too much light from screens. It would be nice if it could detect blue light specifically, but that doesn’t seem to be a feature at the moment. A second light sensor with a blue light filter would let the glasses calculate the intensity of blue light, enabling such a feature.

To keep the glasses relatively small and lightweight (always important for a wearable device), Bennet designed a custom PCB. That contains a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 SoC with an onboard BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) adapter. It can communicate with the user’s phone via BLE, so they can view sunlight exposure data on a simple iOS app that Bennet developed for this purpose. Power comes from a coin cell battery and the frame of the glasses is 3D-printable.

While we certainly can’t endorse Huberman or his claims, Bennet’s Sunlight Glasses could be useful for people that want to monitor their sunlight exposure.