To understand human centric lighting, you first need to understand how sunlight affects your life each and every day. It’s the colors and timing of the sunlight that helps you wake up and go about your day.
Sunrise triggers both a rise in your blood pressure and the production of cortisol, a natural steroid. At the same time, it tells your body to stop secreting melatonin, a natural hormone that relaxes you and helps with sleep.
Throughout the day, light works to increase your ability to focus, enhance reaction times and elevate your mood. When sunset begins to arrive, you begin to slow down. Not only because you’re tired, but also because that energizing daylight is slowly fading away. As the light becomes warmer and loses intensity, your body reacts accordingly.
This process is called Circadian Rhythm. This is your body’s natural process for keeping to its 24 hour body clock, helping your body operate on a healthy sleep-wake schedule. Maintaining a healthy active lifestyle with plenty of rest will keep you functioning and cognitive. Of course, this isn’t always easy. 100 years ago, humans spent 90% of their time outside in the sun. Today that time is spent inside under manufactured light sources, which takes away our exposure to natural light and the effects it can have on the body.
Human Centric lighting is the lighting industry’s initiative to replicate this natural light process and bring the process into the office and home environments. By creating and maintaining the best lighting conditions, we can enhance human performance, maintain a well-functioning interior environment and most importantly, have a very positive effect on human health.
Is it possible to replicate the natural light process? To a certain extent, it is. The testing to date has been encouraging, and many lighting manufacturers – including LEDCONN – have begun to offer products such as tunable white LED lighting. This allows the actual indoor light color to be tuned throughout the day to match the various color temperatures of the exterior light outside. From the warm morning light (around 2700K), to the cooler light around noon (around 6500K) which is the peak of the day and boosts activity and energy. By sundown, the warmer light has returned to the 2700K level and your body begins to slow down. Tunable light color can possibly make a difference.
For example, we have all come back from lunch only to feel tired in the afternoon. But instead of drinking a caffeine drink to “wake up”, the answer may well be a simple adjustment to increasing the light level. This tuning could be accomplished every day and controlled in an office or home setting to match the color and temperature outside, keeping proper internal clock alignment. Testing with tunable light color is being done in schools and hospitals with amazing results. By increasing the light color in schools (boosting the color to simulate daytime light), children are able to focus better in class, and hospitals have found that patients rest and recover better when the light is adjusted to a warmer color, similar to the warm morning light.
If the testing continues to produce such positive results, the future of lighting could be “tunable” in both the office and home.
Thinking about using LED lighting for your next illuminated backlit project?
Learn more about our tunable lighting and other flexible lighting solutions at the LEDCONN products section of our website.
For additional support, contact our team of lighting gurus at sales@ledconn.com or give us a call at (714) 256-2111. We’re here to help in any way we can!
