SSL applications ranging from healthcare to educational to office settings can leverage tunable LED technology for impacts including increased worker productivity and enhanced wellbeing.

Smart lighting and the Internet of Things (IoT) may have been the most prevalent theme at LightFair International (LFI), but tunable-white LED technology was close behind and of course inherently requires some form of lighting controls to set color and intensity.

The IoT-Ready Alliance warns that smart lighting could become obsolete without a common method for keeping sensors up to date.

In the lighting industry’s mission to become the backbone of the fledgling Internet of Things (IoT), it faces several daunting challenges, including a conundrum: While the LEDs inside luminaires last for purported decades, facility operators might have to frequently replace the chips and sensors embedded in those same fixtures.

Now, a new standards initiative hopes to avert this problem in commercial buildings. The IoT-Ready Alliance wants to ensure a consistent, easy, inexpensive method for keeping indoor smart lighting up to date.

“The Alliance is setting industry standards that will enable LED light fixtures to be ‘IoT-Ready,’ facilitating a quick and easy installation of advanced IoT sensors,” the new group said in launching at the LightFair International exhibition in Philadelphia this week.

The IoT-Ready alliance claimed that by making sensor replacement “as simple as changing a light bulb,” it will “enable building operators to easily upgrade the sensors, ultimately future proofing their buildings as IoT technology continues to advance at a much more rapid pace than that of LED fixtures.”

The lighting industry hopes to convince commercial and outdoor lighting operators that lights provide a perfect ready-made skeleton to house the chips and sensors that gather data for the IoT, because lights are ubiquitous and because the electricity lines that already feed the lights can also power the components, eliminating the need for problematic batteries.