Melanopic lighting goes mainstream

How do you know when it’s time to go to sleep? This might seem like an odd question, but it has a complex biological answer that is often overlooked and is critical to supporting our health and wellbeing when we are at work.

The eye performs many helpful roles for us, but one of its main functions is to notify us when it’s time to wake up and time to go to sleep. For creatures that are active in the daytime and asleep at night, we need the hormone melatonin to kick-in at night and make us sleepy, but also to be suppressed during the day so that we feel energised and ready to go. And it is the eye that controls this for us, using the level of light that our eyes perceive to produce the requisite biological response.

However, these changes in light are far more subtle than we are aware of and most of our current lighting systems are not fine-tuned enough to offer the kind of changes in light that we need to keep our circadian rhythms running like clockwork. Currently, most office lighting remains the same throughout the day, meaning that we miss the subtle cues that influence our biological clock and can affect our quality of sleep – and therefore our wellbeing.

Mimic the outdoors

What’s the solution? Enter melanopic lighting, an approach to lighting that aims to mimic the outdoors in terms of offering us the cues that our body needs to get a good night sleep. There are several ways in which lighting can impact our health – it can impact our visual, emotional and biological health, but currently lighting systems are only interested in the first. Melanopic lighting however, takes into account all three of these types of health and works to ensure that lighting has a positive effect on everyone.

By taking into account the impact of timing, lighting intensity and the spectrum of light that a space is offered, melanopic lighting systems ensure that a space is optimised for wellbeing and sleep health, helping employees perform better at work and feel more refreshed during their day. These new lighting systems can also help increase energy efficiently by up to 25 per cent and thereby help organisations cut costs.

So how can your organisation bring melanopic lighting to your office? In a webinar, three experts from Signify – Ravi Koul, Customer Segment Leader at Signify, Rene Wegh, Principal Scientist for Signify Research and Peter Duine, Global Business Director of Systems and Services for Signify –  explain how melanopic lighting works and what steps you can take as an organisation to embed melanopic lighting systems into your spaces. To discover more about melanopic lighting, access the webinar here.