Smart lighting and sensorsfor bereavement facility

It was very clear from the moment we turned up at Treetops Hospice just eight miles away from our office in Derbyshire that this wasn’t going to be an ordinary job. It was the first day of BBC Children in Need’s DIY: SOS’s Big Build, and we’d been invited to install the lighting throughout the programme’s latest project — a Children’s Bereavement Therapy and Counselling Centre.

The hospice, which was established 40 years ago, was looking for somewhere that young people who had just lost a close relative could go in order to work through their grief. In response, the scheme’s architects drew up plans for a 170 m2 single-storey building featuring three counselling rooms, a therapy room, and a multi-functional space where families can meet and socialise. It would be a safe space, relaxing and comfortable, and designed to be fully accessible and neurodiversity-friendly. Treetops also wanted it to include technology that would enable it to operate with low running costs.

Dozens of trade companies involved

With the plans agreed, it was over to BBC Children in Need, which arranged for dozens of trade companies, from bricklayers to plasterers, carpenters, and landscape gardeners, to donate time, products, and skills to make the scheme a reality. For our part, we spent four days on site fitting LED lights, environmental sensors, and an emergency lighting system, linking them not to the usual 240V electrical cabling, but to a network of ethernet cables.

These carry both the electricity needed to power the lights, and the sensors and data to the building ‘comms room’ in order to integrate the information received into a dashboard and the building management system.

At the heart of the installation are the sensors — there are 32 in all, all working together to deliver information about building occupancy, light levels, air quality, and temperature, so that the data can be viewed on one platform. This technology is at the heart of the smart buildings movement, which two years ago was recognised when the NHS launched its six-year National Framework Agreement for the provision of Smart Building Solutions.

Benefits of digital technologies

The agreement recognised how new digital capabilities across hospitals will deliver benefits for users and staff alike, as well as reducing energy use and emissions, just as we have done at Treetops, courtesy of collaborating on a project that was receiving national attention and taking shape in the company of celebrities including Nick Knowles, Zoe Ball, and Scott Mills.

A significant aspect of the smart building technology at Treetops is the lights which — instead of standard 
LED lights — are human-centric, meaning they are programmed to adjust their colour temperature throughout the 
day. This replicates the changing white tones of daylight, from a blue-white 
in the mid-morning/early afternoon (around 6,500 Kelvin) to warmer 
yellow-white (2,700 Kelvin) in the late afternoon/evening, complementing the young people’s own inbuilt circadian rhythms, which are at the heart of a healthy life.

The benefits of circadian lighting in healthcare settings are now widely understood. Although we like to think our technological world has allowed us to break away from nature, humans continue to come awake when it gets light outside, and get sleepy when darkness falls. This is because the light levels affect the activity of structures in our brains that constitute the pineal gland, which secretes the hormone melatonin, which is commonly known as the sleep hormone.

The pineal gland responds both to information it receives concerning the intensity of daylight, and also the nature of the light it receives, with bright short-wave blue light in the morning reducing melatonin secretion — making us alert, and soft, warm fading light in the afternoon and evening — increasing melatonin levels, which eventually sends us off to sleep. Human-centric lighting ensures that this cycle is maintained, while it also has a host of other benefits — because studies have shown that our bodies work best when operating in harmony with our circadian rhythms.

One piece of industry research found that more than half (54%) of staff who worked in an environment with human-centric smart LED lighting felt more energised, while just under half (47%) said they were sleeping better as a result. By contrast, working under traditional, harsh, unrelenting neon strip lighting all day long makes it harder for people to go to sleep later, and subsequent lack of sleep is associated with health problems including diabetes, obesity, depression, cardiovascular disease, and seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Ability to change colour temperature

Our human-centric lights at Treetops promise to deliver these benefits, and can also be used to complement the activities within the centre by changing the colour temperature to match whatever the young people are doing. Much of the therapy at Treetops is non-verbal and designed for children who have been significantly affected by the traumatic bereavement of a parent, carer, or sibling. The facility’s non-talking therapy programme, called the Mollitam Project, offers eight weeks of group therapy for young people aged between eight and 17, during which they can take part in expressive activities such as animal therapy, drumming, art, yoga, and complementary therapy.

These activities have been found to be extremely useful for young people who struggle to find the ways to talk about their emotions through words, or who would find the idea of one-to-one counselling too daunting. They thus get to express themselves in other ways, and the bereavement centre can facilitate this.

If the tasks require concentration, focus, and active engagement, the blue-white light, which encourages alertness, can be employed, whereas if the therapist wants to create a warm and relaxed atmosphere, the lights can be tuned so that they emit a mellower white-shade to relax and de-stress participants.

This functionality would work well in other healthcare settings, where warm light could be used to relax a patient as they enter a consulting room before it is switched to blue/white light when the specialist needs to carry out an examination and exchange information. The evidence to support this comes from the non-healthcare sector, where it is increasingly common for firms to use different lighting to suit different tasks, and where global real estate company, CBRE, found that human-centric lighting led to an 18% increase in productivity, and a 12% increase in accuracy among employees. 

Daylight harvesting

However, there is more. Sensors at Treetops also monitor how much natural light is entering the building so that the brightness of each individual light can be adjusted accordingly. This is daylight harvesting — a concept built on the principle that there is no point having a light on full blast if the areas it is illuminating are swathed in sunlight. By dimming lights closest to the window, and increasing the lights’ intensity as the daylight fades later in the day, the technology reduces energy use and saves costs.

These cost savings are increased at Treetops by adding sensors which monitor human movement in the room and turn the light off — or can reduce its brightness — when the sensors indicate that a room is empty. This means there is no chance of wasting electricity because someone forgets to turn the light off. This technology is not new, but it has yet to be adopted more widely in the UK healthcare sector, especially in hospitals, which are one of the few buildings in our communities which remain open 24 hours a day. This means large areas and their long corridors are kept illuminated at night when footfall is low, and lighting in the wards needs to balance the ability for staff to go about their work while creating a dark sleeping environment for patients.

Greater opportunities for use of smart lighting

According to UK Energy Watch, electricity constitutes 50% of UK hospitals’ energy spend each year, representing a £400 m annual bill. If hospitals adopted smart lighting, using a combination of LED lights and sensors, then the energy costs could be cut by 90% compared with using standard fluorescent lighting, and 40% in comparison with LED lighting controlled by a simple electronic on/off switch. This would be straightforward to achieve. Instead of brightly lit corridors — or corridors that would be pitch black if the lights were switched off — human-motion sensors can keep the LED lights dimmed to the minimum prescribed safe level if nobody is present, and then switch the lights on full as they walk past. Then, when they have passed by, they can return to being dimmed again.

Among the other sensors at Treetops are its air quality sensors, which are linked to the room’s scene controller, and monitor CO2 levels, air pressure, temperature, humidity, and particulate matter.

All of these environmental factors impact on staff and users’ health, often without them knowing. Often, they simply go undetected, leaving occupants vulnerable to the effects of poor ventilation, which can include general stuffiness and increased levels of carbon dioxide, both of which have been shown to affect people’s cognitive performance. Sensors can alert Operations staff to an unhealthy environment, while at Treetops, sensors which measure occupancy are linked to the facility’s building management system so that the air- conditioning can be adjusted automatically to create the optimum environment for however many people are inside.

Our experience at Treetops has shown us the potential that exists in healthcare settings for smart technology, but also the work that needs to be done to spread the word, not least about at what point smart technology needs to enter the planning process. While the filming schedule and the artificial nature of the build meant deadlines were tight, and everything took place over a far shorter timespan — all of which adds to the drama of the show, we learned quickly how smart tech needs to be considered at project management level.

Very much ‘the new kids on the block’

We were very much ‘the new kids on the block’. As IT installers, we are not a traditional ‘trade’, and not everyone was aware of where we fitted in, which meant that when it was our turn to fit our equipment, we could not locate our cabling, because it had been installed and labelled by another company. This meant there was a fair amount of troubleshooting for us to undertake, and was a reminder of how much more awareness there needs to be about the utilisation of ethernet cables — the so-called ‘Power over Ethernet revolution’, which offers savings in terms of installation time and costs, as well as the creation of safer and more efficient workspaces.

Undaunted, we overcame the issues, and achieved our installation well within the deadlines, and in time to take part in the time-honoured reveal, when staff from Treetops were allowed to open their eyes and look around their newly created facility. Now, nearly six months on, with the celebrities and TV cameras having long departed, our work with Treetops is continuing.

Because the technology is integrated into the facility’s building management system, we have an ongoing role to monitor the data that the building is generating, and give real-time feedback on how it is performing and is being used. This will enable Treetops to truly understand how the building works, how it benefits the young people, and how they can all make even better use of their wonderful new building in the future.