Light therapy has been in use since ancient times, practiced by ancient Greeks, Romans and Indians. Early cultures like these realized the healing properties of natural sunlight when combined with topical solutions derived from local herbs. More recently, Niels Finsen, a Faroese physician, began to pioneer the field of light therapy. Niels Finsen won a Nobel Prize in 1903 for using ultraviolet light to kill bacteria, which set the stage for the scientific community to look into treating diseases with artificial light.

Throughout the 20th century, more and more uses of artificial light as means of therapy were discovered, and have since been used to treat an array of illnesses, such as seasonal affective disorder, circadian rhythm disorders, and many skin conditions. For treating skin conditions, such as psoriasis, researchers have found that ultraviolet light in the UVA and UVB wavelengths works most effectively. Pairing UV radiation with drugs can increase the efficacy of such treatments, such as the PUVA technique, which pairs psoralen in the form of either a topical or oral treatment to increase the UV sensitivity of the skin.

Although these treatments can be quite effective against many different skin conditions, they also come with plenty of drawbacks. UV light damages skin cells on a genetic level, along with harming skin proteins such as collagen. Excessive exposure to UV light greatly increases the chance of developing skin cancer, so limiting the amount of UV exposure that patients receive to a minimum is quite important. Patients undergoing UV light therapy are typically closely monitored by a physician, or given sufficient training to perform their own therapy at home with their own machine.

Current devices used for UV light therapy have been developed using fluorescent lamps to generate the UV light. Fluorescent lights are typically bulky, break easily, and lose power over their lifetime. This leads to current machines needing to replace their light sources after about 20-30 treatments, since the lights don’t output enough light at that point to give an effective treatment to patients. Fluorescent lights are difficult to replace, and usually contain mercury, which also makes them difficult to manufacture and dispose of. Assuming that some of these lights will be broken during the replacement process, this also creates a health hazard because of the mercury content of the lights.

Using fluorescent lights also means that these machines consume a large amount of power and generate a large amount of heat. This means there must be systems put in place to deal with these problems, making these machines bulkier and more complicated than they should be. Current technology in artificial UV lighting has started to overtake fluorescent light technology in terms of cost, power, and efficiency. A new system for delivering UV radiation that utilizes modern lighting is a necessity for advancing the field of light therapy.