A functional lighting system is of central importance for patients and staff. For employees in healthcare facilities, lighting must meet the requirements of the visual task – from examinations to care and service to laboratory activities. To ensure that patients feel comfortable in their rooms, the lighting should both comply with standards and also be individually adaptable. The lighting should also be easy and intuitive to control. This is where simple, self-explanatory operating devices help. Special functions may not be immediately apparent to the user, but they are all the more helpful for building services. These include integrated power measurement, system diagnostics, operating hours counters, and status reports.
Large hospitals and care homes are busy around the clock. In addition to medical equipment, lighting is a major cost factor. Sensor-controlled luminaires increase comfort and safety, and also reduce energy costs in the long term by regulating light output as required.
If the values are to be more than just a snapshot, an extension with XAL's IoT Pro sensors is recommended. These offer a comprehensive indoor climate analysis. In this process, the measured values are recorded and evaluated over a certain period, whereby trends emerge. Analyses of the presence sensors record, for example, the bed occupancy rate or the activity of patients, which in turn can be considered in cleaning or room allocation. Based on indoor climate assessments, sensible, cost- and time-saving plans can be drawn up for ventilation or the operation of air-conditioning systems.
Patients recover more quickly the more comfortable they feel in a healthcare facility. Suitable lighting systems create a feeling of calm and security and support the regeneration of body and mind by adjusting the lighting to the needs of the human organism. Since patients and residents often spend long periods in closed rooms, it is essential to create lighting conditions that are as close as possible to natural daylight. Human Centric Lighting (HCL) is used for this purpose. Dynamic colour gradients imitate the natural daylight curve from cold white, activating light in the morning to relaxing, warm white light colours in the afternoon and evening hours. Slow dimming and gentle changes between light scenes make the lighting pleasant and lively. Brightness and lighting mood vary both from morning to night and with the seasons. A modern lighting system's pre-programmed or manually controllable algorithms can equip the lighting with different curves and thus optimally adjust the light to its natural equivalent at any given moment.
Each area in a hospital has different lighting requirements. Multiple lighting standards apply, each of whose limit values must be met. For example, different lighting conditions are required at a 24-hour nurses’ station, where staff carry out computer work, than in a waiting room or in a dental treatment chair. The lighting system must be flexible across administrative desk activities to diagnostic discussions to lighting in a care centre's common room. To ensure that this complexity is straightforward for the building services, the control systems can be maintained centrally. Wireless solutions enable remote control and thus rapid response to changes in demand in individual wings of the healthcare facility.
Particularly revealing data is used in the healthcare sector. This is precisely where lighting systems equipped with smart sensor technology can provide valuable insights. For example, presence or air conditions in patient rooms, which in turn can be used to derive cleaning schedules or climate control. The lighting system provides more than "just" the right lighting here. Collected values and data analyses contribute to smart, energy-efficient building use and provide insights into the patients’ regeneration process.
