University of Oregon

Kevin Van den Wymelenberg

In the past year and a half, the pandemic spurred a crucial demand to address the health of our buildings and protect people from COVID-19 transmission, especially in healthcare facilities. In response, many facilities are implementing new technology to improve the cleanliness and safety of buildings.

Luminaire Level Lighting Controls (LLLC) is known as a flexible lighting system, that can reduce energy use, increase comfort, and we believe, also has the potential to reduce disease transmission. A recently released white paper from the University of Oregon Energy Studies in Building Laboratory, in partnership with BetterBricks, showcases how LLLC systems have the potential to revolutionize how we monitor and respond to environmental factors that improve both human health and building energy efficiency.

LLLC is a lighting system that uses LED fixtures with built-in sensors to tune lighting where and when it is most needed, ultimately saving significant amounts of energy and cost. In other words, LLLC sensors turn off lights when people are not present or dim lights when there is ample natural light from outside.

LLLC technology serves as a network backbone that can facilitate communication between different building system controls, and various environmental sensing technologies. LLLC can facilitates low touch and cost-effective approach to maintain updated distributed sensors in buildings and also supports additional technology innovations. Current LLLC technology includes a swath of features. Most notably for healthcare facilities is asset tracking and ventilation.

Asset Tracking

Asset tracking can be utilized to locate equipment critical to operations quickly and efficiently, such as wheelchairs or mobile medical equipment carts within a hospital. Additionally, wearable technologies can also be integrated with LLLC applications to track mobile patients and residents in senior care or other health care settings, while also monitoring their health. These environmental data can be paired with other health outcome data in clinical settings to better understand environmentally mediated factors that may correlate with healthcare associated infections; wearable data must be collected in a HIPAA-compliant de-identified manner.

Alen Mahic, Research Associate, Energy Studies in Building Laboratory, University of Oregon

In some cases, wearable devices or smartphones can be used to track access to desirable illumination conditions, and provide improved situational awareness of adverse events such as a fire or presence of an active shooter, or environmental exposures such as to thermal extremes, toxicants, or biological agents. In non-emergent situations, which will be far more common, these strategies can support more efficient business operations, and have the potential to save energy.

Ventilation

By pairing data from LLLC and HVAC systems together through Building Automation and Control networks (BACnet), buildings can improve occupancy sensing by zone and increase ventilation when and where it is needed. Given that we are in an endemic era, there is a need to both reduce indoor aerosol-based pathogen transmission risk while also balancing energy consumption. Many indoor air quality experts are recommending disabling Demand Control Ventilation (DCV) during the pandemic, but we propose Occupancy Enhanced Ventilation (OEV) for the endemic era. While the difference may appear nuanced, it is important.

Distributed occupancy data available via LLLCs can be more precise and more predictive than current CO₂ sensors for managing ventilation in traditional DCV solutions. Occupant density sensing has tremendous potential to gauge whether a space is at low risk or high risk for pathogen transmission. This could be an even stronger case if these occupant counts were paired with any data available from facility efforts pertaining to human disease screening or broader community disease screening, such as a county-level human diagnostic disease positive test rates. With these braided data, a reasonable estimate could be made of the likelihood of the building population to include an infected individual at any given point in time, and OEV could provide enhanced ventilation in real-time.

LLLC and HVAC data integration could improve the management of CO₂levels by gauging occupancy levels and preemptively ramp up ventilation as occupants enter a space, and potentially facilitate predictive ventilation control instead of reactive control. This not only can improve occupant cognitive performance by maintaining lower indoor CO₂ levels but can also drive down HVAC energy consumption by limiting the amount of air that needs to be conditioned and moved through a building during periods of low occupant density and sparce occupant spacing. An additional benefit of linking LLLC and HVAC control data is that distributed temperature sensors can also be integrated to improve overall space thermal conditioning and occupant comfort.

Integrated Building Operations

Current LLLC solutions are popular and attractive for healthcare facility managers, especially for those seeking a one-for-one retrofit solution, energy savings, and asset tracking in healthcare settings. Many LLLC systems are flexible, and allow for seamless installations, even for a small facilities team. Next-generation LLLC can support integrated building operations by way of occupancy enhanced ventilation and help to reduce energy use while supporting healthy and safe indoor environments. Even outside of a pandemic, by improving ventilation responsiveness, LLLC holds the potential to reduce indoor disease transmission risk, which is imperative with healthcare settings that routinely see individuals with a variety of infections.

Learn more about how current and future LLLC technology can be applied in countless ways to improve health and efficiency in the whitepaper.