Tunable White LED Lighting Poised to Improve Life in Nursing Homes

Tunable LED Light Improves Health in Nursing Home

Tunable White LED Lighting Poised to Improve Life in Nursing Homes

June 16, 2020/in Color Tuning, Education /by Brooke Sault

More than anyone else, people in nursing homes struggle to find high-quality sleep, which is especially disheartening because we know that elderly people are more susceptible to health issues, which poor sleep can exacerbate. While this is a complex issue, there is a good deal that we can do about it because we understand how our brains decide when it is time for us to be awake and when it is time for us to be asleep. It comes down to our circadian rhythm, which melatonin regulates. Naturally, it was the absence of the sun that would initiate melatonin production. This is still true, but other variables have come into play.

Let’s dive into this a little deeper. When we talk about melatonin production and sleep, we need to talk about the circadian rhythm too. This is what determines how our brain directs our sleeping and waking functions, and while you may be able to fall asleep when you are outside the rhythm, sleep quality will suffer. This is because the hypothalamus inside the brain struggles to operate properly when the circadian rhythm is out of alignment with reality, and when its suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) cannot work in conjunction with the optic nerve behind the eye, it receives unclear signals about light and darkness and makes inaccurate conclusions about day and night.

For thousands of years – the vast majority of history, even the majority of some older people’s lives – all of this information would have been interesting but certainly not immediately relevant. If you experienced minimal or no exposure to artificial lighting, how could this information have been relevant? Today, though, we all come into contact with artificial lighting, almost constantly, and at night, that spells trouble for the circadian rhythm. Just when your brain is trying to figure out when it is time for you to go to sleep and when it is time for you to wake up, you are looking at your phone or your tablet, exposing yourself to blue light, and throwing your circadian rhythm out of sync.

For younger, healthier people, it is possible to throw the circadian rhythm out of sync and still fall asleep at night. It is possible in the way that it is possible to eat unhealthy foods for a day without falling ill, but it is not the ideal. In nursing homes, on the other hand, sleep challenges are already widespread. If you have ever visited a nursing home yourself, then you may have observed these challenges in action, the difficulties that many residents face when they are trying to sleep or when they are trying to go about their days and inadvertently falling asleep. As one study out of the University of California put it, “Although older community-dwelling adults are more likely to take naps than younger adults, the typical long-term care resident shows a pattern of wakefulness that is frequently interrupted by brief periods of sleep.”

When sleep issues already run rampant, any solutions could prove groundbreaking, and in nursing homes, sleep challenges do run rampant. Before the influx of blue light that smart phones and smart pads ushered in, sleep quality was already critical to elderly people because of the health issues that arise from poor sleep. Falling short of their sleep requirements and falling ill or sleeping during the day, during inopportune moments, elderly people may try to make up for sleep that they missed at night, but as research has shown, this concept is false: we cannot make up for sleep once we have missed it. As you surely know yourself if you have ever tried to go through a Monday on only two or three hours of Sunday-night rest, quality of sleep impacts quality of life, but what else does it mean for people? How does a smooth circadian rhythm affect our lives?

Irritability, poor concentration, poor memory, slower reaction times, decreased performance: these are all well-known symptoms of low-quality sleep. In the elderly – in particularly the elderly who suffer from dementia, a condition already associated with the same symptoms – these symptoms can become overwhelming, to the point that research published in Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Treatment concluded that over a ten-year period, there was a link between insomnia and elderly suicide.

Knowing this, we also know that we need to do something to respond to these challenges. The Pandora’s box of blue light is open, and there is no turning back. We can encourage people to avoid their phones in the evening over and over again, but we need something more active to respond to these challenges effectively. To determine how we can respond to these challenges, it is useful to look beyond circadian rhythm and its theoretical effects and consider the real-world effects of circadian rhythm in nursing homes – and how circadian lighting can make a difference.

Circadian Lighting Effects in Nursing Home

To figure out what circadian lighting could mean to nursing homes, we can look to the research. One study from the US Department of Energy is especially encouraging, pointing to the game-changing numbers that they have seen circadian lighting drive and the inimitable impact that this lighting can have on populations where the rates of sleep disturbances are high – as we said, even affecting a majority of all the people within the population.

In this study, out of the ACC Care Center, researchers consider the residents of the 99-bed facility as a whole. They stated, “The objective was to test a strategy for measuring and documenting light exposure for typical residents, and to evaluate the collected data in terms of multiple metrics for human circadian responses over the course of a day.” This is an important point to make because, as they also point out, this science is still new. Newer than the blue-light-emitting devices that exacerbated these sleep issues in the first place. Dependable tunable white lighting is an innovation that, unfortunately, most nursing home professionals and administrators have not heard of. When we see the undeniable effects of circadian lighting in nursing homes, that is the only explanation that would make any sense, too.

For their study, researchers for the US Department of Energy depended on three models for circadian wellness, each of which purports to tell us how light is impacting sleep quality: melanopic/photopic (M/P) ratios, equivalent melanopic lux (EML), and circadian stimulus (CS). Let’s consider each of these models.

For an M/P ratio, we are considering the melanopic content and the photopic content, both measured at the eye. Sometimes, experts will refer to this as the “blue-cyan content” because that is what it is describing, the blue light that is at an eye. When the M/P ratio is high, it leads to wakefulness, and when the M/P ratio is low, it leads to sleepiness.

An EML, meanwhile, accounts for the radiant watts that our ipRGC photoreceptors detect and the photopic content at the eye – again, higher equating to more wakefulness and lower equating to more sleepiness.

Then, there is CS, which measures the suppression of melatonin, once again the higher values equating to wakefulness and the lower ones equating to sleepiness.

The researchers for the ACC Sleep Center study used what we call “spectrophotometers” (Konica-Minolta CL-500a) read the radiant energy data necessary to calculate M/P ratio, EML, and CS, detecting light in the nursing home environment so that they could compare their readings to the objective reports that the nursing home residents submitted regarding their sleep quality. From this, we can extrapolate calculations and objective reports into conclusions about the effects of different types of lighting on elderly people’s sleep quality.

Making a point of controlling the static lighting at 4100K, the researchers strove to imitate the eye lighting conditions in the morning for all residents so that they could say more definitively that they were observing results caused through nighttime lighting conditions. This means that when we are reviewing the statistics and conclusions in this study, we can say with a high degree of confidence that we are reviewing the effects of nighttime lighting conditions as well.

The researchers also worked from an assumption that has become mostly universal by now among those who are familiar with the different types of lighting and their effects: low, warm-color light leads to stronger melatonin production, which leads to higher sleep quality. Pictures were taken of the same corridor, but at different times of the day to provide a visual example of the tuning range (Photo from Report is Below).

Time and again, the outcome was clear: tuned white lighting made a difference. Anything but indecisive, their research showed a significant gap between the sleep disturbances that residents experienced when exposed to old styles of lighting and the sleep disturbances their counterparts experienced when exposed to cutting-edge tuned white lighting. Static lighting, repeatedly, correlated with higher incidences of sleep disturbances in this nursing home.

It is important to realize that the static lighting the researchers used was no different from the static lighting that nearly all nursing homes are using at this very moment. The environments that they replicated for their study would have been indistinguishable from many other real-world nursing home environments, which begs the question: how many elderly people are suffering needlessly? How many people in nursing homes are laying awake at night, unable to get their circadian rhythms in balance, unable to fix their melatonin production, falling asleep in the middle of the next day when their families are visiting them? What are the repercussions of sleep disturbance in regards to the nursing staff?

The gap between static lighting and tuned white lighting, it turns out, is a chasm. You may be wondering, How serious could the difference have been? As far as science goes, the answer is very. Exposed to tuned white lighting, residents experienced only half as many sleep disturbances as they would have exposed to static lighting – 1.8 versus 3.6. In research of this kind, that is the type of determinative difference that researchers are looking for, either to confirm their hypothesis or deny it. When only half as many nursing home residents are experiencing sleep disturbances while exposed to some stimulus, that stimulus merits further attention, to say the least.

Researchers were even more direct in their conclusions about the study, stating that “The intervention likely worked to reduce sleep disturbances in the 5% to 7% of residents with many severe sleep disturbances.” While 5% to 7% is a minority of all residents, it would be difficult to overstate how life-altering it could be to reduce their severe sleep disturbances because, again, these challenges result in more than irritability and poor concentration. Over time, severe sleep disturbances, like insomnia, can lead to a number of irreversible health issues, up to and including suicide.

The researchers, reviewing their M/P ratio, EML, and CS calculations, determined that tunable white lighting was effective at cutting down on blue-cyan content at night and at delivering higher levels of blue-cyan content in the morning and during the day, when wakefulness becomes important. In every way, this lighting seemed capable of improving quality of life at the ACC Care Center, calculation after calculation turning out positive and in favor of the newer lighting type.

Astoundingly, the researchers for the US Department of Energy also reported that “[I]n an institutional setting with shared rooms, such as the nursing center in this study, improving the sleep of a few residents may have a ripple effect on roommates and closely located others.” Put another way, we can create a wave of health benefits by improving nursing home residents’ sleep, thinking beyond the immediate and measurable figures that we are examining in M/P ratio, EML, and CS calculations. It is rational to assume, therefore, that in a nursing home, everyone benefits from tuned white lighting.

Lighting to Improve Life

Tunable white lighting – often referred to, appropriately, as circadian lighting – has shown promise as a sleep aid in a way that no other innovation has. When we think of the defining role that smart devices are playing in our lives, their smorgasbords of blue light filling us up and damaging our melatonin production whether we like it or not, this means that tunable white lighting could be the answer. This could be the technology that we all need to reclaim higher-quality sleep for ourselves and make a pointed shift away from the low-quality sleep that would come to define this era otherwise.

In nursing homes, the concerns that we are raising rise beyond the level of convenience and desire. Because of the high rates of insomnia and sleep disturbances that already permeate these environments, we need solutions now. These are pressing circumstances, and if we ignore them, we are setting ourselves up for disaster. Likewise, if we respond to these circumstances effectively, we can do incredible things – even saving lives. There is an opportunity to make life better for people, showing our friends and family in nursing homes that we care and that we are willing to take steps to show that.

Circadian lighting, or white tuned lighting, is the next frontier in lighting, and it seems right that nursing homes would find themselves pioneering into it. Blue-cyan content, shaping wakefulness and sleepiness the way that it does, ought to come back under the control of the professionals and caregivers who think of nursing homes as their calling. For the residents who depend on them, this innovation could mean the difference between one life and another – between high-quality sleep and something else.

The statistics are clear. Today, nearly half of all adults age 60 and up report insomnia, and more than half report some form of sleep disturbance. For those who think of insomnia and sleep disturbances as natural byproducts of age, we would point to the facts that the US Department of Energy and other researchers have uncovered in their studies. Better is possible, achievable through modest interventions. Something as straightforward as changing out some lighting can slash sleep disturbance rates in half, returning elderly people to sleep habits and circadian rhythms that are truly natural, correcting the flaws that blue-light saturation has introduced.

PERFEKTLIGHT is our answer to all of the questions and demands that this research has presented. We have engineered our tuned white lighting system with the human body’s circadian rhythm at the forefronts of our minds. Because we are so enthusiastic about the difference that this innovative lighting can make, we have devoted ourselves to perfecting it. Our system not only draws on the benefits of tuned white lighting in general but also enhances and optimizes the technology, taking it to a whole new level.

All-In-One Guide To Tunable White LED Lighting

June 9, 2020/in Color Tuning, Education /by Brooke Sault

According to the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, white tunable lighting is “the ability to control a light source’s color temperature output.” Manufacturers have achieved this innovation by combining LEDs of different color temperatures into single bulbs or strips. By controlling the LEDs inside the bulb or on the strip, you can then shift (or “tune”) the color temperature within a fixture. This may sound like a simple feature on its surface, but it is in reality a game-changer for many industries and environments – and, as we will see, perhaps even for all people everywhere.

Tunable white LED lighting is a groundbreaking type of lighting that technically combines multiple lighting sources. Without these multiple sources, the shifting or tuning that we are describing would be impossible. It is only through specific changes, turning off one LED and turning on another, that we can achieve the incredible effects for which this type of lighting has become known. A marvel of both engineering and human psychology, tunable white LED lighting promises to change the world in a significant way – to a degree that no other type of lighting has since the first incandescent lightbulbs appeared on the market in the 19th century.

Unlike any other type of lighting, tunable white LED lighting connects directly to our minds, not physically but conceptually. Because we can shift the color temperature in a tunable white LED lighting fixture, we can optimize it according to the environment or even according to the time of day. That way, we can align the light with our circadian rhythm to better match the gradual dimming effect that humans experienced for eons living in the wild, underneath the sun during the day and underneath the moon at night. Gone are the days of glaring, overwhelming lightbulbs, their insistence on shining the same bright beams down on people regardless of appropriateness, impossible to control.

We can think of tunable white LED lighting as “custom temperature lighting.” This is not custom in the sense that we need to personalize it in the factory, though. This is custom in the sense that we can personalize it on the fly, making changes as we need to make them, lowering or raising the color temperature according to our moods, whims, and desires. We need no better reason than “I want the light to be different” to reach for our tunable white LED lighting controller and then press a button or turn a knob, however our system happens to receive our input. This is lighting that is ushering in a new and unprecedented level of convenience and control.

To measure the white light produced via tunable white LED lighting, we use color correlated temperature (CCT). CCT figures correspond to our real-world experiences of lighting, and we measure them in degrees Kelvin. To give you an idea of what CCT means, consider the measurements 1,800 Kelvin and 7,000 Kelvin: the former corresponds to candlelight and the latter corresponds to daylight. When you see a tunable white LED lighting system that features a range within two CCTs, it means that the lighting can run between those two CCTs – and perhaps along them as well, hitting infinite possible CCTs. One key point to remember is that the higher the CCT in Kelvin, the “cooler” white it will yield, emitting a bluish white (the “coolest” white) at the highest CCT in Kelvin.

As researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute put it, CCT is “simpler to communicate than chromaticity or SPD, leading the lighting industry to accept CCT as a shorthand means of reporting the color appearance of ‘white’ light emitted from electric light sources.” This is just a straightforward way for us to talk about what we are perceiving when we look at a source of white light.

Mark Halper at LEDs Magazine refers to tunable white LED lighting as “human-centric lighting,” and in recent years, this term has caught on throughout the industry. We will examine in greater detail the reasons this term fits what we can also call tunable white LED lighting. You already know, however, that tunable white LED lighting can match the human circadian rhythm, and this is an elucidating point. You can learn more about circadian rhythm in this article, which discusses how inextricable it is for overall health and wellness. Once we understand how tunable white LED lighting meshes with what we naturally expect and desire from our lighting sources, the rest of its benefits starts to make much more sense.

In addition to tunable white LED lighting and human-centric lighting, this type of lighting goes by a variety of names. Another is “dim to warm lighting.” This term states in the least-assuming way possible what the lighting type is accomplishing, moving from a dim color temperature upward to a higher one, its color temperature not fixed, a major step away from every other type of lighting that the market had seen previously.

Yet another term for tunable white LED lighting is “full-color tuning,” which refers to the capacity of the lighting type to emit light that captures the breadth of color temperature. Even more complimentary than “dim to warm lighting,” this term expresses the choice that has made it so captivating for people who are tired of purchasing lighting fixtures only to become dissatisfied with their color temperatures a short while later (and find themselves stuck with it, totally lacking control).

Whatever we call tunable white LED lighting, the most critical idea for us to realize is how drastically it differs from all other lighting types. Everything it accomplishes, it is the first lighting type to do so. Next, we are going to review how tunable white LED lighting accomplishes what it does – through the blending process.

The Blending Process

There is no way to understand tunable white LED lighting without first understanding how blending works. The process, in this case, is inseparable from the technology. To fulfill its purpose, tunable white LED lighting must combine the outputs of multiple LEDs. By following algorithms to shift from one CCT to another, the highest-quality tunable white LED lighting systems will mix multiple white light outputs – merging channels that are all producing white light at different color temperatures, from the very warm all the way to the very cool.

In their overview of tunable white LED lighting, the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy called controls “a critical element in white-tuning systems.” This, however, is an understatement. Tunable white LED lighting is inseparable from its controls: without its controls, the “tunable” part of the name would cease to apply.

Using the right controls – which may function via wireless Zigbee, Wifi, Bluetooth, or other signals – we direct the blending process to achieve the CCT that we intend. While more primitive systems struggled to maintain consistency in color temperature, modern tunable white LED lighting has adopted real-time feedback systems that combat the color shifting that takes away from the overall output quality.

To comprehend what differentiates one tunable white lighting system from another, we can look at the concept of linear tuning, which is the most common. This type of tuning is a detriment to CCT, its linearity pushing CCT away from the curve of the blackbody, which is something that absorbs all the light around it. Doing so, it leads to inaccurate CCT that is not along the curve of the blackbody – marring the light with a pink hue error. It was only recently that technology for non-linear tuning became feasible, its multi-color LEDs remaining outside most budgets.

At LEDynamics, we believe the most elegant non-linear white tuning solution involves an algorithm that combines pointed and precise amounts of green light, causing CCT to shift along the curve of the blackbody in a nonlinear movement, eliminating the hue error inherent to linear tuning. More on this later.

Where Tunable White LED Lighting Fits

Tunable white LED lighting is, of course, much more than a trend or a novelty. This is lighting that can make life better for people. We have discussed how tunable white LED lighting can adhere to the human circadian rhythm to a degree that no other lighting can. This may sound intriguing in theory, but what does it mean in the real world? When we say that tunable white LED lighting is “human-centric lighting,” what are we talking about? It is undeniably interesting that we can change the color temperature of a light. We may even find ourselves thinking Wow, how far science and engineering have come. Now, let’s look more closely at what these advances mean for the world.

To understand why tunable white LED lighting has shown such immense promise, we only need to consider its potential effects. This lighting can adapt to people’s moods, responding to the shifts that people need to experience to feel comfortable in any environment, raising or lowering the color temperature in such a way that people’s mental health will benefit. It can also adapt to interior styles, expressing ideas and emotions in an environment, immersing people in these ideas and emotions and heightening the impact that the space has on people.

One study out of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reported that within an elementary-school classroom in Fulsom, California, students performed better when they were doing their schoolwork under tunable white LED lighting. The Department of Energy had funded the study to analyze the cost savings they could expect by installing such lighting on a large scale. As striking as their findings about the savings were – amounting to costs that were somewhere between 48% and 69% lower – their findings about academic success were even more inspiring, conjuring up images of students nationwide studying and thriving under tunable white LED lighting in the school years ahead.

Another study exhibited the usefulness of tunable white LED lighting in retail, where the lighting boosted sales. Time and again, researchers have concluded that tunable white LED lighting is simply preferable. This is lighting that people appreciate and that they feel comfortable around. Because diamonds appear most attractive under cooler color temperatures but other metals and colored stones appear more attractive under warmer color temperatures, jewelers can optimize their sales processes through tunable white lighting – or even apply white light to white surfaces for even more stunningly minimalist appearance.

Because tunable white LED lighting can improve people’s moods, it fits anywhere that people’s moods come into play. Retail environments, schools, and healthcare settings are the most obvious places where tunable white LED lighting would serve clear and immediate purposes, but in offices too, tunable white LED lighting is making a difference – not only helping people to feel happier and more comfortable but also enhancing productivity levels across teams, motivating people to work harder and to think more creatively.

This incredible lighting type also seems capable of shifting people’s perceptions of actual temperature. Conceivably, businesses in Minnesota could install tunable white LED lighting and change the color temperature in January to instill a perception of warmth. Businesses in Florida, meanwhile, could install tunable white LED lighting and change the color temperature to instill a perception of relief from the overbearing hot outside.

The entire atmosphere within any environment is malleable, all thanks to tunable white LED lighting. You can decide what you want people in an environment – or just yourself – to feel or think, implementing tunable white LED lighting as a tool to push perceptions in the right direction. Tunable white lighting can prevent post lighting installation issues that may arise, when customers decide that the project feels too cool or too warm. Thanks to tunable white lighting, the color temperature is no longer permanent once the fixtures are installed. Planning and execution often falling into disconnect between one another, this level of control allows people to change their minds – say switching from a black granite table (which would look best under a cool color temperature) to a dark wood table (which would look best under a warm color temperature).

In the near future, it seems likely that tunable white LED lighting will become the lighting type of choice, for those who recognize its value at least. It only makes sense that hospitals, offices, schools, and other sensitive environments will install tunable white LED lighting en masse once the word is out. For many professionals and experts in the lighting field, this remains something of an open secret, the inventiveness and the undeniable value of tunable white LED lighting constantly on display for all to see but still remaining just out of conscious view for people who have not heard of it or who have not gone looking for it on their own.

Think of it as a club, and now you are a part of it.

A Clear Choice

Never before has a lighting innovation coalesced so well with what people need out of their lights. Long before we knew it, traditional lighting was disrupting our circadian rhythm, and for many urban dwellers, a good night’s sleep remains ever-elusive because of the bright incandescent lights that pour through their windows at all hours. Think about the popular image of the insomniac unable to escape the ever-present glow of the brightly-lit billboard outside her window. This is an extreme example, of course, but it illustrates the effect that lighting can have on our lives. We crave lighting that aligns with our moods and desires.

Other types of lighting feature two modes – on and off. Through the most advanced tunable white LED lighting systems, there are infinite modes, all of the degrees of color temperature within the color temperature range of which each system is capable. Whatever you want out of your space, however you want your lighting to make you feel, it is possible. Wake up to the softest trickle of light, like the gently rising sun. Do your work beneath something a little bit cooler and a little brighter.

Tunable white LED lighting is poised to fundamentally alter our relationship with lighting. We are looking beyond the “on/off” switch and thinking about everything we have ever wanted lighting to be. If you have dreamed about a lighting system that accounted for your vision within your home, office, restaurant, classroom, hotel, or retail location, tunable white LED lighting is for you. The future of lighting is unfolding before your eyes – gradually, of course, and ever so gently – and you are welcome to take it in and then take control of it at your leisure.

This is the lighting type that we have all been waiting for. For everyone who has ever thought that something better must be possible, we want to tell you – it is. We want to state in no uncertain terms that tunable white LED lighting is different.

This is the cutting edge of lighting, and our team at LEDdynamics is working on the cutting edge of that – the cutting edge of the cutting edge. We are the first lighting manufacturer to create a non-linear tunable white lighting solution that uses green correction, and we want to show you what a difference it can make. This is a thrilling innovation. We have invested in it heavily, and we remain focused on it, confident that this is the next great frontier in lighting. Changing spaces worldwide, we are proud to stand up as pioneers in human-centric lighting.