Studies have found that implementing lighting controls showed major health improvements to seniors and other people in long term facilities. When installing lighting controls, you can set the lights to run on a circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is when the lights follow a 24-hour cycle to the sun’s daylight and nighttime. To keep a circadian rhythm within a home for facility, morning will have low intensity in the morning, high intensity in the afternoon, back to low in the evening and no light when its time for bed. During the daylight hours there will be more intense blue lights, then warmer-yellow color temperature in the evening.

This type of strategy improves the health of people who cannot regularly go outside, like seniors in care facilities, patients in hospitals or people within prisons. Color temperature plays a crucial role in peoples health. Exposure to blue-enriched light helps improve cognitive function and alertness. When bodies are kept on a circadian rhythm it also helps improve sleep. Within the elderly community, it has proven to help reduce falls by 43%. Falls are one of the leading causes of injury within American adults 65 and older.

“Falls among care home residents have major health and economic implications, and this study is the first of its kind to translate the known beneficial effects of tunable lighting on neurocognitive responses into a real-world setting and examine if changes in lighting spectrum and intensity throughout the day can reduce the risk of falls in the elderly,” said Shadab Rahman, Ph.D. MPH, Investigator in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Click here to read the study, published August 11, 2022 by the Midwest Lighting Institute.