Hyundai Mobis announced on Jan. 24 that it has developed human-centric interior lighting technology specialized for future mobility environments.
The new technology realizes a system where interior lighting interacts with users by recognizing their biorhythms and preferred usage environment and showing various colors, brightness, and patterns. As the global automotive industry is rapidly shifting to future mobility including electric vehicles and autonomous driving, this technology was developed to maximize user experiences and satisfaction by redefining the functions and purposes of vehicle interior lighting.
The human-centered lighting technology developed by Hyundai Mobis can realize a total of 32 situational patterns. These include reducing drivers’ stress and motion sickness (supporting the management of health), reacting to their external environments, keeping drivers safe when getting out of the car, preventing car doors from hitting other cars, and ultraviolet C-band sterilization lighting.
While conventional interior lighting functions are limited to simple color changes or mood lighting, human-centric lighting is a system that actively works in conjunction with users’ biorhythms, health, and the external environments of their vehicles. In the process of developing this technology, Hyundai Mobis has secured hardware and software design capabilities and automotive electronic system control technology for those functions.
The utilization patterns of the human-centered lighting system are specific and diverse. First, the system analyzes users’ stress levels such as heart rates and eye blinks and displays different colored lights. If their stress levels are high, the lights will be red, if they are normal, they will be green. The idea is to make drivers aware of their own stress levels so that they can manage them. It can even adjust to activate or stabilize body rhythms based on environmental changes such as morning, evening, and inclement weather.
This next-generation lighting technology also provides useful features for the safety of vehicle users. To prevent accidents when getting out the car, sensors will recognize blind spot hazards such as hazards from not seeing coming motorbikes and warn the driver with lights. In order to prevent a car door from hitting another car when getting out of the car, the car itself will calculate the distance between your car and the next car over and display the risk of the door hitting the other car via color. Ultraviolet germicidal lighting can also be activated to create a cleaner interior environment if the car is not used for a certain period of time.
Another feature of this lighting technology is that it is a convergence technology. In the process of developing the lighting technology, Hyundai Mobis brought together other core technologies that Hyundai Mobis already has such as biosignal control, eye tracking, and camera sensors. The company believes that it can provide differentiated value by fusing technologies from other fields in the process of designing lighting functions that customers want most.