What is Human Centric Lighting?
Stamford, CT – Human Centric Lighting is exactly what it sounds like: lighting that is centered around humans. What does that really mean though? Human Centric Lighting is lighting that can benefit the health and wellbeing of people. This type of lighting feels more natural than fluorescent and older LED lights.
Creating a lighting experience that falls in line with Human Centric Lighting can be accomplished with tunable white lighting and one product that can achieve this is Ketra. Ketra’s tunable white light allows you to fully control the color temperature of your interior light to match the sunlight entering your home from doors and windows.

In commercial locations, research has shown that Human Centric Lighting can help employees’ production and overall wellbeing. The International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) has acknowledged the importance of Human Centric Lighting.

WELL Building Standard
The WELL Building Standard® is a performance-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring features of the built environment that impact human health and wellbeing, through the air, water, nourishment, light, fitness, comfort, and mind. In the past, it has only been applied to commercial and multi-family residential homes. On May 8th, the IWBI 2021 announced that single-family residences will have their own WELL Building Standard.
In this video, you can see how Ketra plays a role in Delos fulfilling their light requirement for their buildings’ WELL Certification.
As humans, we are intrinsically drawn to the outdoors. Now that we're spending 80% or more of our time in the built environment, we're finding that many adverse health outcomes are linked to this relatively recent shift to living indoors. WELL focuses on how the building lives, breathes, and functions to provide a healthy space for us to work and live. One of the largest categories within the standard is the Light concept, and Human Centric Lighting is a requirement in order to achieve WELL certification. With Lutron's automated window treatments and Ketra's light fixtures, we're able to really wrap our arms around the Light concept of the WELL standard as a whole.
Getting in Touch with Natural Light
Humans were exclusively reliant on natural light from the sun for millions of years, waking up by the sunrise and going to sleep when the sun set. Only since the industrial revolution roughly 160 years ago, have we been altering our sleep patterns with artificial light. While this capability to control light has allowed the human race to become more productive, it has left us less connected to the natural light cycle.
With the development in lighting products such as Ketra, we can have our interior light match the light coming from the sun through our windows. Ketra’s light can be synchronized to match (through color temperature and dimming capabilities) the natural sunlight that is entering your space through the windows and doors.
Synchronizing interior light with the natural exterior light is going to help you throughout your day. Instead of waking up with a cool bright white light at 100% intensity which is closer to mid-day light, you can wake up with a softer and warmer light around 2600K at a much lower intensity level, easing you into the morning. When it’s the middle of the day and you want bright energizing white light you’ll get that too with Ketra.