Illumination for Wellness

The Cooledge Advantage

Lighting (and Sound) Designed Around People

An increased awareness of the relationship between health and our environment – which will grow in importance as businesses focus on attracting people back to their workplaces, shops, and venues in a post-pandemic world – has resulted in new and higher standards for building design that consider all aspects of the user experience.

Lighting is one of the most important components of designing for wellness. Cooledge luminous ceiling products offer significant advantages compared to traditional approaches by delivering immersive illumination that scores points in virtually all of the applicable design categories used in the new standards that define what is required of lighting to meet the needs of people. As a bonus, Cooledge luminous ceiling products also help address requirements for noise control.

Everyday experience tells us that lighting has a substantial impact on our emotional well being. Of course, lighting is still the critical element of any visual experience and is enhanced by illumination that is both vibrant and comfortable, free from glare and which faithfully renders colors as nature intended.

Good Lighting is Good for You

Lighting is About More Than Seeing

Studies have shown that people today spend up to 90% of their lives indoors, yet for most of our history we lived under the wide open skies.

Nature has not only shaped how we see the world but also human physiology and our emotional responses to the lighting in our environment.

There is compelling evidence demonstrating substantial physiological benefits associated with lighting that works in harmony with the circadian rhythms that influence our sleep patterns, hormones, and other critical biological functions.

Cooledge Luminous Ceilings are Good Lighting

Comfortable Illumination on the Scale of Nature

Unlike the points and lines most often used in traditional lighting, Cooledge luminous ceiling products provide the type of illumination that more closely matches the natural light that molded our vision system, emotional responses, and physiology. Large scale, uniform, diffuse illumination that forms the background of our lives.

Just as the light found in nature is variable and everchanging, Cooledge luminous ceiling products are fully dimmable to levels as low as 0.05% and are available with tunable white, dim-to-warm, or W+RGB capability to enable virtually any ambient feeling you might find outdoors.

Check Out Our Luminous Ceiling Products

Luminous Ceilings

Cooledge Scores Points

WELL v2^TM Pilot & v2^TM Certification

One of the emerging standards for ensuring buildings are designed and built to enhance human health and well-being is the WELL v2^TM Building Standard. The standard includes requirements for Lighting and Sound. Both of these “concepts” define nine (9) features for which points can be scored to contribute to an overall score that determines the rating of the building from bronze to platinum.

Cooledge luminous ceiling products have the potential to score points in 8 lighting features (we don’t provide real daylight) and simultaneously in 3 sound features.

Melanopic Illumination

Circadian Lighting Requires Melanopic Illumination

Much of the research investigating the physiological benefits of lighting has focused on circadian lighting. One of the key elements that has been identified is melanopic illumination which depends on a combination of two factors: light spectrum and luminous flux.

Evidence suggests that high levels of melanopic illumination in the morning are beneficial for entrainment while low levels later in the day assist in adapting for sleep.

To determine melanopic illumination levels requires that the “melanopic ratio” be calculated based on the Spectral Power Distribution (SPD) using a calculator tool designed for the purpose. This ratio is then multiplied by the photopic (regular) illumination to obtain the melanopic illumination.

Melanopic Illumination = Melanopic Ratio x Photopic Illumination

Some Cooledge luminous ceiling products have the melanopic ratio available on specification (data) sheets using the tool developed for application of the WELL v2TM standard. Try the Melanopic Calculator.

For our products where this information is not published or to use other calculation tools, Cooledge provides the SPD data in a compatible format.

Download Cooledge Spectral Power Distributions

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