LIGHTING
An LED may look the same as those old technologies, but generates light in a completely different way.
lightbulb was fixed – cool ‘blue-ish’ or warm ‘yellowish’. You could dim an incandescent or halogen lamp, but a fluorescent was either ‘on’ or ‘off’. We might have used a timer or an occupancy sensor to reduce electricity use, but constant switching tended to make them burn out more quickly, so it was often simpler just to leave them all on. The LED, or light-emitting diode, may look the same as those old technologies, but generates light in a completely different way: a stream of electrons are forced across a semiconducting chip, generating a cloud of photons that are driven through layers of minerals to tune their wavelength or colour. These chips are so small that you can pack multiple units (different colours, or a ‘cool’ and a ‘warm’ white) onto a single board or strip – you may be familiar with the flexible decorative strips. You can reduce the brightness and change how much light each chip generates simply by adjusting the amount and distribution of electricity going through each element in the array. Provided that the electronics are correctly specified, you design, engineer, and control a lighting system to deliver many of the ‘active ingredients’ that we now know your non-visual system needs to keep your body clock on track.
LED’s ‘remarkable efficiency’ The remarkable efficiency of LED chips, and the fact that they can be dimmed or switched in a fraction of a second, all while maintaining their lifetime hours, means that these new solutions can be up to 80% more energy-efficient than fluorescents, while delivering the same, or greater, light levels. The next generation of light fitting is designed to meet the EU EcoDesign Regulations, which came into force in July this year.3
The LED chip can
be taken out and replaced, leaving the housing in place – much like an old light bulb, keeping disruption to your busy working environment to a minimum, and further reducing the carbon footprint over the lifecycle of the installation. As energy costs rise, and pressure to move to zero- carbon solutions grows, many healthcare
34 Health Estate Journal September 2024
Different lighting can have a significant impact on mood and setting.
providers find they can justify the costs of an upgrade in electricity bills alone.4 Increasingly, these smart lighting
systems not only deliver granular control 24/7, but they can also be configured to feed information back to the Facilities manager or building owner. Daylight harvesting and other sensing
technologies can be built into the fitting, transforming the humble lightbulb into the gateway to an integrated building management system. Setpoints can be used to dim the artificial light when there is enough natural light in the space, to manage automatic blinds to reduce glare and improve thermal control. They can track occupancy rates and performance across the day and the week to optimise energy use, and plan routine cleaning and maintenance to suit your team’s schedules, saving money on call-out charges, reactive repair, and ad hoc replacement. These energy and operational savings
are substantial, but the most expensive line item for any business is its people. While these ‘soft’ KPIs are harder to measure, research suggests that lighting design, including access to controls,1 actively supports the diverse needs of staff, especially those working shifts, can improve productivity and engagement, and even reduce recruitment costs. The potential to use the data in real time to spot unusual movement and falls can release care staff from routine night-time checks to focus on proactive daytime activities that support resident wellbeing. If this all sounds complicated and
expensive, be reassured: circadian lighting is not rocket science, and the costs are coming down all the time. There are three broad types. The baseline for all circadian lighting systems is fittings known as ‘tunable white’: these fittings include multiple chips that allow the user to shift from ‘cool, focus’ to ‘warm, relaxed’ to suit their mood or the task in hand. ‘Dynamic’ lighting is programmed to shift automatically, generally from bright and cool light in the morning, through to a warmer light in the late afternoon. The standard protocol can be optimised to suit ‘solar’ time, or activity patterns such as night-shift work. This simple change
has been shown to improve mood and productivity in offices and schools, especially in settings with little or no access to daylight through a window. A subset of these dynamic lighting
systems is engineered to deliver the specific levels and pattern of light-dark exposure recommended by scientists to support the day-night cycle. This is known as ‘circadian’ lighting. Alongside these ambient lighting strategies, a growing number of clinics and psychiatric units, especially in Nordic countries, are using a targeted intervention known as ‘Bright Light Therapy’ (BLT) to successfully manage depression and other mood disorders. Research suggests that this simple procedure can be as effective as an antidepressant, although BLT is often used as an adjunct to, rather than a replacement for, pharmacology.5
This is similar to the
‘SAD’ lamp you might have used at home, where the patient is exposed to bright light (10,000 lux, roughly the light levels on a bright day outside in the UK) for 30 minutes every morning.
Is this reflected in building standards? If you’re specifying lighting for a hospital or residential healthcare setting, the system you choose will need to meet a number of rules and guidelines in addition to the basic building regulations for safety, energy efficiency, and accessibility. There are three main documents that a lighting professional or engineering consultant will work with: the CIBSE Lighting Guide for Healthcare (LG02:2019), the CIBSE Lighting Guide for Communal Residential Buildings (LG09:2022), and the European Standard for Workplace Lighting (EN12464-1:2021). The requirements set out in CIBSE LG02 and LG09 focus on visual performance (light levels, colour temperature, glare, and flicker). But EN12464-1 goes beyond these parameters to account for the role of lighting in setting the body clock and the needs of older adults, who tend to need higher light levels, as we’ve seen. Of course, just as an apple on its
own doesn’t constitute a healthy diet, a circadian lighting system won’t transform the health and happiness of patients or
Photos courtesy of Chromaviso
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