Tale of Two Belts

Red Light Therapy

In this article let’s dive deeper into a comparison between the inexpensive “Headot” (Amazon $30) vs the Scienlodic (Temu $41).

The most striking, and perhaps most important, difference is dramatically different power output. The Headot emits four times the amount of light as the Scienlodic. Consider this is also after the Headot has become defective, losing one row of lights and being unable to support power level “P5” (P4 and P5 output the same amount of light now).

Headot at 6 inches

Scienlodic at 6 inches

Headot at 3 inches

Scienlodic at 3 inches

To obtain more accurate results, I’ve converted one of my bathrooms (who needs four bathrooms?) into a lab where I can use a photography stand to control precise positioning of the sensor and in a dark room (my laptop screen and the red light devices provide enough light for me to work).

Note: a trick of using this spectrometer and not getting misleading results is to manually set the “Integration Time” to an appropriate value (using the same value to compare different devices). Otherwise if you let it “auto detect” exposure you will have misleading results. Integration time is the amount of time over which the spectrometer collects a set of data.

Also notice these belts are designed to generate more power at a red light frequency about 650 nm vs near infrared light around 850 nm. Note: at only 3” away, exact positioning of the spectrometer sensor can result in shifts in which frequency it is most detecting (might be pointed more toward a 650 nm LED vs a 850 nm LED).

As you can see below, the inexpensive panel is heavily weighted toward generating near infrared light. The panel delivers significantly more power but isn’t suited for placement directly on your skin. This is intriguing as the belts are more likely intended by consumers to be used for muscle and joint pain relieve, whereas a panel may be more expected to provide overall skin exposure to light.

CLMTAS Panel at 6 inches

It would seem that I should buy a third low cost belt to see if we can come to better conclusions as to the expected performance of these low cost red light therapy belts. Note: I did order another brand of low cost belt today.