There are few yuckier places to be than trapped inside a convention hall with depressing lighting, stale air, noxious chemicals from booths and carpets, cacophonous sounds, and general over-stimulation. Well here comes Delos with its first ever Wellness Pavilion.
At CEDIA Expo 2019, escape the cruds in the first-ever Wellness Pavilion, hosted by Delos, the company behind the Well Building Institute and Well standards, and the developer of the Darwin Home Wellness Intelligence Platform.
Step into the pavilion to enjoy a “transformative experience,” as Delos chief commercial officer Anthony Antolino tells it. “When you walk through that front door, you’ll be transported to a biophilic place.”
For several months, CE Pro has been harping on biophilia – the notion that human beings are hardwired to survive and thrive in nature – and the health-and-wellness benefits of being outdoors … or some semblance of the outdoors.
Delos is putting the concept to the test at Expo, with a peaceful place brimming with nature, both real and artificial. The pavilion will feature a living wall of plants, “super-high-quality air” filtered by an Amaircare air-purification system.
Settle into a zero-gravity chair in the pavilion, and the wellness experts will envelop you with a weighted blanket. Slip on a black-out mask and noise-canceling headphones … and then pick your auditory poison.
Delos will offer a curated library of audio options for your relaxation pleasure: guided meditation led by famed New Ager Deepak Chopra (a Delos advisor and designer of the Delos-inspired Muse Wellness Residences), or a “power-sleep sequence” are a few of the options to lull you into slumber.
As you slip away, the circadian lighting system will dim and adjust the color temperature to a reddish hue and then fade to dark, mimicking a sunset. The sequence reverses when it’s time to arise, gradually brightening the lights and cooling the hue to a daylight setting.
“For 12 to 15 minutes, you have checked out,” Antolino says. “You are getting a mental reboot and a physical reboot. … You’re walking away feeling rejuvenated and recharged.”
Your freshly rejuvenated self then gets a lesson from the wellness experts at Delos on the science of the biophilic experience – why you feel refreshed – and how you can “take this narrative back to your business,” Antolino explains.
“Inside 15 minutes,” he says, “we’ve done a 360-degree experience in a very visceral way that gives the integrator the ability to take something that can impact their business with a sell-side strategy and a sell-side narrative.”
Delos Ecosystem, Algorithms and Channel Strategy
Delos has been active for a few years in the hospitality industry, equipping a few thousand “Stay Well” hotel rooms with aromatherapy, air purification, water purification, and a Philips Wake-up Light that “combines both light and sound to create a more natural wake up experience, making you feel more refreshed.”
Biophilia & Wellness at CEDIA Expo 2019
CEDIA Expo 2019 will be remembered as the show where biophilia and wellness really took off.
In addition to Delos’s big wellness experience, the Expo will feature a group of exhibitors in a special wellness area next to the Delos pavilion.
Elsewhere on the show floor, attendees can find new exhibitors in wellness categories that are just now hitting the integrator channel – indoor air quality, water purification, sit/stand desks, spas and more.
Plus, Leon Speakers is converting its Airstream into a biophilic space on the show floor, and several companies will be demonstrating honest-to-goodness circadian lighting systems that we haven’t seen in the past.
Unlike the Stay Well solutions, which comprise a set of highly-curated, mostly standalone wellness devices, the residential solutions revolve around Delos’s Darwin platform, which informs and interacts with connected subsytems, including circadian lighting, air filtration, water purification and other “comfort-focused technologies, all of which simulate the natural outdoor condition,” according to the company.
In the case of Darwin, Delos will vet appropriate subsystems and devices, but won’t prescribe components for a wellness ecosystem.
As such, the company is not necessarily highlighting its vendor partners in the Wellness Pavilion at CEDIA Expo.
“We want to be interoperable and agnostic,” Antolino explains, “because the world, the consumers, dealers, everyone has their own preference. … We want to say: Use the system that is most beneficial to you. We’ll lay the wellness layer into, on top of, underneath, or adjacent to it. We want a friction-free experience that improves your health and well-being.”
So far, Delos has announced future Darwin deployments in Australia with Simonds Homes and Lateral Estate and in the U.S. with KB Home.
WATCH THE WEBINAR: Biophilia & the Wellness Revolution with Julie Jacobson
At CES 2019 KB showcased a Darwin-powered concept home, called ProjeKt, featuring circadian lighting, air purification, water purification, a living garden wall, noise-reducing windows and walls to promote relaxation, and antimicrobial paint and drywall that absorb VOCs (volatile organic compounds).
Meanwhile, Delos has aligned itself with the home-tech buying group HTSA, and so far has trained about 15 integrators on wellness principles and the Darwin platform. Another 10 integrators will go through the training before CEDIA Expo.
CEDIA Expo 2019 will be a breakout event for Delos, and the first time ever that integrators can immerse themselves in a wellness experience … and then incorporate the experience into their commercial enterprises.
The opportunity comes just in time, Antolino says. Delos has spent the past eight years developing research platforms and refining the formulas for health and wellness in built environments.
“We want to start feeding everybody, get them excited, make sure they get to CEDIA,” says Antolino. “When the market heats up, everyone is going to come out of the woodwork. We have an obligation to make sure we tell the right story.”
That is … a story grounded in science and extensive research.
