Energy Efficient LED Spectrally Matched Smart Lighting

Innovative Imaging and Research and the University of Houston Clear Lake have teamed to develop a widely extensible, affordable, energy efficient, smart lighting device known as Lambda-Net. Smart building technologies, such as Lambda-Net, are becoming critical to energy savings and sustainability for terrestrial applications and space-based habitats. Our device incorporates a smart-mobile device or other comparable sized integrated computing/sensing device into each LED fixture. Smart-mobile devices are ideally suited to perform energy saving lighting control as they contain inexpensive, mass produced, highly integrated imaging, computing and communication technologies. The low cost digital cameras within these packages become highly capable imaging photosensors using calibration techniques developed for NASA satellites and the commercial remote sensing industry. Novel algorithms utilize lighting information measured by the photosensors to individually tailor the intensity and spectral content of the light generated from each LED fixture within the lighting system to reduce energy usage, increase lighting efficacy and improve circadian rhythm influenced activities such as sleeping and concentration. Advanced spatially distributed occupancy sensing and lighting control further reduces energy usage. Integrating sensing and computing into each light fixture also provides the infrastructure to create a robust sensor network. Network communication is achieved through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other communication means, such as the power lines that provide electricity to each fixture. This resulting sensor network enables a wide range of terrestrial and space-based applications including monitoring: building/habitat temperature, humidity and air quality; occupant health and safety; building/habitat space utilization and astronaut activity including deep space adaptation in addition to providing high quality spatially selectable, spectrally programmable illumination.