Helia bulbs cut blue light to help you sleep at night
It's like Night Shift for your house.
Soraa doesn't generally make lighting solutions for us plebians. Its lightbulbs grace the likes of the Palace of Versailles, not the One Bedroom of Terrence. But the company is ready to dabble in the consumer market with Helia. These smart bulbs jump not just on the bandwagon of IoT, but embrace the growing hostility toward blue light.
See, all of this time staring at screens has taught us that blue wavelengths of light are not very good for our sleep patterns. And now, slowly but surely, app makers and device builders are starting to add features that filter out blue light at night to help preserve our circadian rhythms. But, now that we're often surrounded LED lights in our kitchens and bedrooms, which also have an annoying tendency to pump out lots of blue light. Helia tackles this by pairing a high-tech lamp with an advanced filter. Pair the bulbs with the app via Bluetooth, and it pinpoints your locations and syncs your bulbs with sunrise and sunset. As the day wears on, Helia slowly filters out more and more of the blue wavelengths until none are left.
It's a pretty neat trick, but Helia actually has a few more up its sleeve. See, the bulbs all communicate over your power lines, creating room-based groups. If you tack on the Presence Smart SNAPs, you can get all the lights in your kitchen to turn on in the morning as you enter the room. Pick up the Cloud Connect, and you can control the lights via Alexa and IFTTT.
Obviously, the floor at CES is not the best place to get a lighting demo, but the difference between the Helia bulbs (on the left in the top photo) and the generic LED ones the company brought with it was readily apparent. While Soraa filters out all of the blue light, it's still able to maintain a more natural- and neutral-seeming hue by carefully controlling the rest of the light spectrum.
All of this doesn't come cheap, however: When the bulbs finally go on sale in spring of 2017, they will cost $50 apiece. The Presence Smart SNAPs will set you back $30, and the Cloud Connect another $50.
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