By Joe Barrett
Health and wellness at the touch of a button is one step closer. Today’s smart home automation systems can integrate features that enhance many aspects of health and wellness, from mood to energy levels to sleep. Thanks to a partnership between Barrett's Technology Solutions and DELOS, a global leader in wellness real estate, homes built by the Chicago-based NextHaus Alliance team of experts can include an innovative home wellness ecosystem.
The DARWIN wellness hub is available as a stand-alone wall mounted enclosure
Like ecosystems in nature (and, for that matter, the human body), the home wellness ecosystem is interconnected and ultimately influential on overall health. The DARWIN wellness intelligence platform offered by NextHaus Alliance spans air purification, water filtration, and lighting, among other functions. A homeowner can control functions via a handheld device equipped with a convenient app.
Heating and cooling: A home environment should be both comfortable and healthy, during the day and at night. Through the wellness intelligence platform, a homeowner can control optimal temperatures, with cooler temperatures for better sleep at night and warming temperatures in the waking hours to start the day with the right energy.
Lighting is a way to enhance mood, reduce stress or boost energy, depending on the time of day.
Lighting: Likewise, smart home automation systems can control lighting that impacts and improves one’s state of wellness, beginning with lighting that mimics the rising sun in sync with natural circadian rhythms. The system can be calibrated to a home’s location for even more relevant, beneficial lighting.
Air quality: The wellness intelligence system can detect pollutant spikes in a home’s air quality and then purify that air to reduce indoor contaminants that negatively affect cardiovascular, respiratory, immune and cognitive health. Air quality scores can be generated for specific rooms as well as the whole house. Information on outdoor weather can also be accessed easily by the app.
These kinds of automated systems directly influence and improve health and well-being, an objective on the minds and priority lists of today’s homeowners, even before the COVID-19 pandemic and home quarantines. The wellness real estate market has been growing at a rate of about eight percent every year, according to the Global Wellness Institute. Going forward amid current circumstances, interest is expected to grow at an even more rapid pace.
Source: Delos, Healthy Living Environments
Combined with the expertise of the NextHaus design team that has long specialized in sustainable, resilient and healthy home design, construction and décor, smart home technologies can be installed easily and efficiently for better health and wellness at your fingertips – literally.
Joe Barrett is president of Barrett’s Technology Solutions and a core member of NextHaus Alliance.
