Working in an office from 9 to 5 is no longer the norm in our society. In fact, most people report only planning on going into the office 2-3 days a week for the foreseeable future, especially as the pandemic rages on. CES talk “Technology for Healthy Work from Home Practices” delved into how technology can make working from home even better. Melissa Matalon, senior director of member programs at Consumer Technology Association hosted panelists Ian Bryant, senior director of strategic partnerships at CEDIA, and Michael Don Ham, president at RePure.
Much of the health of working from home is intertwined with human-centric lighting and design. Circadian lighting makes it easier to people to work with energy during the day and transition to “home life” when the lights dim in the evening. Access to enough sunlight during the day ensures that a positive outlook and an energetic mindset are possible. When working outdoors is possible, like on a porch or deck, the homeowner can achieve all of these advantages at once. When the outdoors is not a practical working environment, instead it is helpful to work around references to nature like live plants.
Monitoring the indoor air quality is also essential for maintaining a healthy working environment. According to Don Ham, radon is the leading cause of environmental lung cancer in the U.S. and often goes unnoticed by families.
“When I was serving the end user years ago, we would do radon testing and we often found cases off the chart,” said Don Ham. “In layman’s terms, if you’re at eight picocuries per liter, that’s like smoking 20 cigarettes per day.”
Easy monitoring of this makes it simple to eliminate this risk for people spending more time in their homes. There’s also a possibility that insurance companies will use this information in the future to lower insurance costs or provide other benefits.
“We project that there will be some kind of data concierge of being able to put it all into using data encryption or blockchain technology to secure data and pick who you want to share it with,” said Bryant. “It’s something that’s changing every day but will be something to pay attention to.”
