Sometimes, to Sell an Idea, You Have to Build a Prototype First. She glued Velcro pads on the sides of his head and showed us how to cover his eyes with the mask that blinded him during those winter nights as he lay, naked except for a diaper, in a humming pool of pale blue light. But discomfort, inconvenience, and risks attend the conventional approach of using fluorescent and halogen lamps. Parent and child suffer the trauma of separation.
Exposure times are long.
There are risks from possible side effects of infrared and ultraviolet light and, at home, of unskilled people applying the eye patches. Dr. Daniel Seidman of the Sheba Medical Center in Tel-Hashomer, Israel, found a better way. He recognized it immediately as a technology that could revolutionize phototherapy. Seidman brought the idea to a group of researchers in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford's School of Medicine with whom he regularly worked, and Stanford pediatrics senior research scientist Hendrik J. Vreman and neonatologist Dr. David Stevenson launched an effort to work out the technical possibilities and details. Their idea is that these chips can eventually be woven into a blanket, jacket, or pajamas to essentially wrap the infant's skin in a close-contact bath of intense light in the correct narrow band of wavelengths.