When you think about ways to feel healthier, eating right and exercising probably come to mind. But home design? It may not be on your healthy-living radar, but it should be. Color control LED lighting, smart sensors, and other smart home technology can all improve your space to help you start your day smoother, sharpen your focus, and live all-around better.
We incorporated some of the best examples of this in our 2021 House Beautiful Whole Home in Fredericksburg, Texas, thanks to the Cync smart home team. Watch the video above and read on to see how you can leverage smart technology to boost wellness in your day-to-day.
Uncover Your Options
What’s truly exciting about this moment is that the idea of a house that adapts to and addresses many of your needs is far less complicated and otherworldly than you might have previously imagined. With very little effort, you can integrate connected devices with your home's existing setup and design to promote healthy living—and the payoff is big.
“The smartest technology has a positive impact on our daily lives,” says Ryan Herd, CEO of Caregiver Smart Solutions, which specializes in the use of connected technology to create safe, healthy living environments. To help you reap some of those benefits for yourself, we tapped Herd and the industry experts at GE Lighting, a Savant company, and manufacturer of Cync smart-home products, to share some strategies for using smart tech to enhance your wellness at home.
Go Natural
Research suggests that there may be health benefits to starting your mornings off with cool, blue lighting that gets whiter throughout the day, and then becomes more warm and golden as night approaches—much like the natural course of the sun. This may improve overall cognition and instill healthy circadian rhythms, making it easier to fall asleep and enjoy the health benefits of a good night's rest. So an easy first step toward a home that promotes health is to create your own system to achieve this, with lighting that changes colors and turns on and off at certain times during the course of the day.
If you want to try it out and you’re new to smart-home tech, you can start small with a single smart bulb, like the Cync Direct Connect Tunable White Smart Bulb. Screw it into the fixture of your choice, like a bedside table lamp, and then download the Cync app. Connect the bulb with the app and create your perfect color scheme (or “scene,” as design pros call them) and schedule it. You can add more bulbs to incorporate more rooms. Additionally, the Cync Indoor Smart Plug allows you to bring any lamp that uses a regular outlet into this daily schedule, giving you more options throughout your home.
Add Some Color to Match Your Mood
The power of smart lighting doesn’t stop with creating healthy schedules. High-tech bulbs also offer millions of colors that you can use to create different moods or ambiances. In a home gym, for example, cool blue-white can be ideal for high-intensity training, but a softer, golden light might give you a better vibe for a calming yoga workout. Elsewhere in the home, you can use color-changing bulbs for dramatic effect: mixing hues to liven up a cocktail party or syncing the lights to your sound system or content on your TV screen, for example.
Here, your best bet are smart bulbs that provide a broad range of color options like Cync Direct Connect Full Color smart bulbs, which offer millions of hues in addition to the full white spectrum. The intuitive app makes it easy to find the perfect color; you can even take a picture of the room and use the app to find a shade that complements your decor and wall color. Another option is Cync’s Full Color Light Strip, a peel-and-stick solution that makes it easy to fill any room with bands of rich color.
Use Your Voice
With the help of a smart speaker like the Amazon Echo or Google Nest Audio, you can use voice control to make work-from-home days a little less stressful. For example, say you’re in the middle of meal prep when a work video call suddenly pops up on your computer. With a simple voice command like “Hey Google, brighten the lights by 50 percent,” you can make the room camera-ready in a flash. And that’s not all, says Herd. “Smart speakers have so many health-related benefits, whether it’s checking the heat index before heading out for a run or setting a reminder to take medications.”
Once you set up your smart speaker, it’s easy to sync up any connected devices in your home. Cync’s Direct Connect products are an excellent way to get started, given that the line's smart bulbs, switches, and plugs can connect to Google and Alexa voice assistants right out of the box.
