Assessment of human annoyance under flicker condition

The international standard EN 61000-4-15 gives functional and design specifications for the Flickermeter currently used to evaluate the flicker severity, as defined in the International Electrotechnical Vocabulary. That instrument doesn't work properly if light sources different than incandescent-filament one are considered. This paper is aimed at presenting a step towards an innovative Flickermeter which is able to account a larger variety of luminous sources. In particular, the goal of this study is to find a new method to define the human annoyance under flicker condition, based on the measurement of the pupil size in presence of different flicker stimuli. The design and characterization of an automatic system able to generate flicker and measure the pupil size will be presented. In addition, the results obtained on human subject will be illustrated.