GE Plans to Engineer Intelligent LED Lighting Compatible with Apple’s HomeKit

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.

“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.