Welcome to the Lighting for Health & Wellbeing newsletter for Dec. 20, 2021. Since our ultraviolet (UV)-focused UV Tech Insights newsletter deployed last Thursday, I’ve been anticipating our top 20 LEDs Magazine stories of the year culmination. But we’re not there quite yet.

Just today, I’ve posted a blog on the top four stories in the Lighting for Health & Wellbeing channel that are unrelated to UV radiation for disinfection applications. In order to not repeat top stories across our website topics, I’ve separated out UV stories and will post that list later this week.

In perusing our coverage as well as our contributed content for the year, it occurs to me that although UV was still a trending topic in 2021, readers showed great interest in a couple of stories that highlighted the potential of visible antimicrobial light generated by LEDs. We have not spread that focus to our feature-length content this year, and so we have some excellent articles on industry best practices and the complexities of design and operation parameters for systems that deliver antimicrobial light in the visible spectrum coming in 2022.

Coming back to this past year, we saw significant interest in light quality, optimal circadian function, energy efficiency, and other healthy building features to deliver improved experience in the built environment. A couple of our featured and trending items in this newsletter reflect the apparently competing needs of proper illumination for visual acuity and light that supports healthy human functioning in indoor spaces. But why should these be mutually exclusive? Dr. Martin Moore-Ede of Circadian ZircLight wrote this year that the way to balance the quality, health, productivity, and energy demands lies in advanced spectral engineering and determining “effectiveness thresholds” for each objective.

In recent days, Bridgelux announced that it commissioned an independent study to learn whether designers would see a difference between the Bridgelux Thrive and 90-CRI light sources, and to determine which looked “more natural” to participants. As Maury reported in November, the Thrive 93 LED products are now on the market after a quiet period since the debut announcement at LEDucation in 2019. To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, the Thrive technology “was preferred 88% of the time” by participants in the lighting preference study. But what is “natural light” exactly? According to the company, a more natural light output is one that matches the spectrum of the sun more closely across all color temperatures. And the company launched a campaign to quantify such a characteristic as “naturalness” last year by developing its Average Spectral Difference (ASD) metric. We have yet to see this metric catch fire across the industry, but we certainly support improved quality of light which is necessary to build upon the first generation of LEDification.

You’ll find more of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. Please keep in touch about content we post or to pitch a contributed article.

- Carrie Meadows, (603) 891-9382, [email protected]