Excessive exposure to blue light has been linked to many health issues (including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and insomnia). Researchers from Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University, led by Prof. J.H. Jou, have been advocates of candle-light OLED lighting for a long time, as part of their fight against the hazards of LEDs and white light. We recently posted on Prof. Jou's latest research on smartphone display risks and the benefits of OLED displays.

In 2015, Taiwan's PMOLED maker WiseChip Semiconductors licensed National Tsing-Hua University's blue-light free OLED lighting technology (called Candlelight OLEDs), with an aim to mass produce these OLEDs by the end of 2017. That project faced delays, however and now NTHU announced that following a collaboration with China's OLED lighting maker First-o-lite it is now ready to commercialize its technology and NTHU demonstrated the first device to use these new panels - the OLED lighting desk-lamp you can see in the video above (and photo below).

In 2017, Mercedes introduced OLED Taillight in its Mercedes 2018 S-Class Coupe and Convertible cars, and it seems that the German auto maker is now aiming to use OLED taillights in another model - the upcoming C238 E-Class Coupe was spotted in Stuttgart - with a new OLED taillight design.

The 2018 S-Class Coupe and Convertible used OLEDs produced by LG Display, and each taillight module contains 33 individually controlled red OLED panels. In the new C238 E-Class Coupe, it seems that each module uses 16 red OLEDs.

Yeolight Technology (which was spun-off Visionox in May 2015) developed candle-shaped transparent OLED lighting panels. The segmented panels have five different lighting panels each with its own brightness. The total size is 11.26 x 26.26 mm (with a thickness of 1.05 mm).

Yeolight tells us that these new OLED candles has been developed for a customer that will soon ship its final product to the market. The panels are now in production.

The Fraunhofer FEP institute, the Holst Center and other partners have developed a 15-meter long OLED lighting panel, the longer OLED device ever (beating their own 2017 record of a 10-meter OLED). This work was done as part of the Lyteus, the EU's €14 million initiative within PI-SCALE.

The partners in this project say that this is the first OLED produced using a new unique roll-to-roll (R2R) process that combines the performance of an evaporated OLED stack with solution processing of auxiliary layers.

In March 2018 OLEDWorks launched its first flexible OLED panels, branded as BendOLEDs. The company now announced that the panels are now commercially available - and rebranded as LumiCurve Wave, which is the first panel in OLEDWorks LumiCurve product family.

The LumiCurve Wave is produced on Corning's 0.1mm thin Willow Glass flexible glass substrate. OLEDWorks says that the Wave panels are extremely thin and light and deliver the superb light quality and excellent color rendering that is uniquely achievable with OLED.

Departures magazine (a premium magazine shipped to around 25,000 American Express Platinum Card members) included an innovative ad for Audi's A8 with flexible OLED lighting panels that are activated when first opened (and also when the reader clicks on a replica Audi key that is included with the magazine).

Personally this seems to be an overly expensive and wasteful way to advertise. We do not know what kind of OLED panels are used in the ads (which was produced by US-based Structural Graphics). In 2017 Konica Minolta Pioneer OLED (KMPO) demonstrated its simple flexible OLED lighting panels integrated into packaging technology - which could be the one adopted here (although other companies have demonstrated similar solutions as well).

TADF developer CYNORA has announced that it has extended its joint-development agreement with LG Display. The two companies have been co-developing deep-blue TADF OLED emitters for two years, and have now decided to continue the cooperation towards the commercialization of TADF emitters in OLED displays.

CYNORA's latest deep-blue material specification was presented in May 2018 - with a CIEy of 0.14, EQE of 20% and a lifetime of 20 hours LT97 at 700 nits. Cynora expects to have blue material in mass production by 2020. Cynora says that its TADF materials are suitable for both self-emitting or co-emitting approaches (which includes hyper-fluorescence).

Korea's Yonsei University deployed OLED lighting installations, one in its 24-hour study room (Laptop area) and the other in its Hall of Fame. The University says that the new OLED lighting systems provide better eye-comfort and upgrade the study atmosphere.

The Laptop Area uses rectangular OLED panels, both in the ceiling chandeliers and on the desks themselves. The Hall of Fame uses LGD's 300x300 mm flexible OLED panels.

In 2015, the EU launched the €4.4 million Flexolighting project (led by Brunel University London) with an aim to develop new materials, processes and methods to overcome current OLED lighting challenges - including lifetime, lighting uniformity and more.

The project's consortium announced that following the project completion and a rethinking of the complete OLED supply chain, it believes that high efficiency OLED lighting panels can be produced at a cost that is on a similar level with LED lighting.