A new HDMI box called "Drift TV," priced at around £80/$100, promises to improve your quality of sleep (and reduce the time it takes you to fall asleep) by removing or reducing the amount of blue light emitted by your TV screen.

The box, made by a company called Saffron, has an HDMI input on one side, an HDMI output on the other, and some buttons that increase or decrease the amount of blue light emitted by the TV. You can program the Drift to automatically transition from full-spectrum to no-blue over a period of an hour so that you don't notice the shift. You can also set a "wake up" time, presumably in the morning, when the full colour spectrum is restored.

Exposure to certain frequencies of light can suppress the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that helps animals anticipate the onset of darkness, and thus it also plays a role in governing our circadian rhythms. Back in 2012, Harvard published a research letter saying that blue light in particular is very potent when it comes to suppressing melatonin secretion.

For many years, there's been a PC app called F.lux that does much the same thing: in the evening, it slowly warms your monitor's output until it's very yellow. More recently, F.lux has also been released on OS X, Linux, and jailbroken iOS devices, and there are alternatives for Android. The Drift TV box seems to be functionally very similar to F.lux, but with the added flexibility of being able to use it on any display that supports HDMI.

As for whether F.lux or Drift will actually increase your quality of sleep or help you get to sleep faster, you'll probably have to try it yourself and see. There has been a lot of research over the years indicating that certain spectra of light can play havoc with your sleeping patterns, and apps like F.lux have a lot of positive testimonials—but then there are also lots of people out there (including me) who use a normal PC monitor or smartphone display right until they shut their eyes and try to sleep and have no issues falling asleep.

If you do struggle to fall asleep at night, you should certainly try F.lux—and then, if that works, consider dropping £80/$100 for the Drift TV box. Another lower-tech solution is to simply not look at any computers or TVs for an hour or two before bed. Perhaps you could play a board game instead?

Saffron says the Drift TV box will begin shipping in December.