Following up on the popularity of Philips Hue and Belkin’s WeMo offerings, GE has announced that it will soon be releasing its first Apple HomeKit-enabled Intelligent LED lightbulbs. GE is also including features that will help save on energy costs and even help improve your sleep.
These new bulbs will include GE’s Align technology that is designed to increase the amount of melatonin produced in your body throughout the day. By increasing the amount of blue tones in the light, the body will encourage melatonin production which will in turn help build a healthy sleep cycle. GE explains further:
By tuning the spectrum of light, GE Align AM bulbs mimic daylight and suppress the body’s production of melatonin. GE Align PM bulbs, meant to be used in the evening, produce an amber light, reminiscent of candlelight and campfires, and do not disrupt sleep circadian rhythm.
LED lightbulbs are now the expectation rather than the exception and Apple’s HomeKit will add remote features that have become popular. This will enable users to control lights with Siri and also trigger on/off commands based on location and the status of other HomeKit enabled devices. Unlike other lightbulbs that require third-party apps or work around with services like If This Then That, HomeKit enables product controls to built directly into iOS. By doing so, devices can communicate via Apple’s services instead of attempting to bridge the gap in unsupported ways.
Philips Hue
Philips’ Hue lightbulbs have stood out amongst the competition in this product category and now GE will be competing directly with them. It will be very interesting to see how these new LED bulbs develop and if features such as color-changing and if different styles of lighting become a part of the design as well.
HomeKit rollout has moved at a snail’s pace since its WWDC 2014 announcement, so it’ll be interesting to see if GE hits its shipping estimate of “later this year” for these new bulbs. If you cannot wait until then, GE already has its line of Link Smart LED lightbulbs available now.
[9to5-press-release]
GE Intelligent LED Lighting Connects with Apple® HomeKit Ecosystem
EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Beth Comstock, President & CEO, GE Business Innovations, today shared GE’s plans to engineer intelligent, color-changing LED lighting compatible with Apple’s HomeKit during GE’s Connected Future event, unveiling LED-enabled Intelligent Environments capabilities for cities, buildings and homes.
“We’re excited to announce our support for HomeKit as it will bring a seamless, intuitive user experience using Siri and superior quality of light from America’s most trusted lighting brand for more than a century.”
“As we continue to grow our infrastructure business by connecting our brilliant industrial machines to the Internet, it is important that consumers experience connected things in easy-to-use, everyday ways. Lighting is how many first experiment with the idea of a smart home, and our insights show that consumers want the ability to control lighting from anywhere, automate lighting and pair lighting with other devices—like sensors, thermostats and door locks,” says Comstock. “We’re excited to announce our support for HomeKit as it will bring a seamless, intuitive user experience using Siri and superior quality of light from America’s most trusted lighting brand for more than a century.”
Embedded with GE Align™ technology, GE’s HomeKit-enabled LED bulb takes smart home technology a step further, giving consumers the ability to automate lighting according to the body’s natural sleep circadian rhythm. Lighting impacts our sleep patterns, and GE Align tunes the light spectrum to help promote the body’s natural sleep cycle by controlling the blue concentration of light output. In the morning, GE Align produces a bright, bluer tone that suppresses the body’s production of melatonin, and in the evening it produces an amber light, reminiscent of candlelight and campfires.
HomeKit provides an easy, secure framework to easily navigate, integrate and control GE intelligent LED lighting, enabling:
- Individual device control and grouping devices into scenes all under one command
- Interoperability and integration with other connected devices
- Secure pairing through authentication and end-to-end encryption between GE intelligent LED and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
GE’s HomeKit-enabled intelligent LED offering will be available later this year.
GE Lighting
GE Lighting is changing the way people light and think about their world in commercial, industrial, municipal and residential settings. Light brightens our path to a better way of being. Today, light is intelligent. Light listens, learns and sees. GE. Where Light Is Bright. www.gelighting.com
GE
GE (NYSE: GE) imagines things others don’t, builds things others can’t and delivers outcomes that make the world work better. GE brings together the physical and digital worlds in ways no other company can. In its labs and factories and on the ground with customers, GE is inventing the next industrial era to move, power, build and cure the world. www.ge.com
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