Effect of Light Therapy on Quality of Sleep Among Elderly Women at Selected Old Age Home, Bhubaneswar, Odisha

Volume 9 Issue 1 February - April 2019

Research Paper

Effect of Light Therapy on Quality of Sleep Among Elderly Women at Selected Old Age Home, Bhubaneswar, Odisha

Sailabala Mohanty*, Rupanjali Patra**

*-** SUM Nursing College, Siksha O’ Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.

Mohanty, S., Patra, R. (2019). Effect Of Light Therapy on Quality of Sleep Among Elderly Women at Selected Old Age Home, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, i-manager's Journal on Nursing, 9(1),11-19. https://doi.org/10.26634/jnur.9.1.15429

Abstract

Being an elderly woman presents itself with array of unique problems, then these problems are aggravated by the marked changes in the socioeconomic transformation, which leads to a number of changes in different aspects of living conditions. Sleeping problems are one of the many problems in our modern society with major psycho-physical implications. The major changes in elderly women's sleep formation are decrease in sleep quality, sleep disturbance, difficulty in starting and maintaining sleep. Elderly women take lot of medications for good sleep, but this will lead to complications, and the possibility for using technology for improving sleep is also majorly accounted for. This is a new way by which better sleep in elderly women could be sustained and the paper has underlined the important role of technology, that it could play. In the study, quasi experimental pre-test post-test only design was adopted to assess preexisting health conditions and effect of light therapy on quality of sleep among elderly women in selected old age home in Bhubaneswar, by taking 48 elderly women in experimental and control group through simple random sampling method. Total study was conducted in following four phases, i.e. pre intervention, intervention, post intervention, and follow up. Light therapy was given in morning for 30 minutes by cool white florescent LED in 10,000 LUX light to the experimental group. The result of pre-existing health conditions showed that sleep disorder is found maximum in control group (91.66%) and experimental group (87.5%). The result revealed that at the end of light therapy in intervention and during follow up period, highly significant increase in global score of quality of sleep was found compared with pre intervention score. The light therapy has also significant impact on sub components of sleep quality. It was concluded that light therapy has been shown to be effective non-pharmacological therapy for improving quality of sleep among elderly.