Investigation Research on Lighting Environment Improvement of Outdoor Rescue Work at Night

The purposes of this study are, to understand obstacles for rescue and medical workers such as poor lighting conditions and visual object factors at night time outdoor works, to extract problems regarding visibility and color conditions under current situations of medical work relief activities at night time, and to make proposals for the improvement of the lighting environment in order to secure better rescue and medical activities in the future. First, we conduct survey to rescue workers to extract needs and problems of visual environment in disaster situation. One should take note that there are differences with regard to luminous flux, irradiation area and color rendering. There also should be standardized input of information on specifications of equipment. Moreover wereports collecting the spectral reflectance data and creating the color chart database of quasi-skins in shock and congested state by healthy young/ elderly subjects, in order to determine the visual conditions of disaster victim’s skin under a situation like buried in rubble. In so doing we examine the influence of gender and age. Also, we develop the methods of high speed continuous measurement of luminance distribution in the visual field using moving images in order to assess the adaptation luminance in the nighttime rescue situation.