Healthy, natural, efficient and tunable lighting: four-package white LEDs for optimizing the circadian effect, color quality and vision performance

To date, most current reports on the development and optimization of artificial lighting sources have focused on the energy performance levels and limited color qualities of white light-emitting diodes (LEDs). However, these properties are insufficient in terms of representing all performance levels required when adjusting white LEDs for healthy and smart lighting. Here, we introduce essential and advanced figures of merit pertaining to circadian performance as well as vision performance and color quality. We compare all possible properties of commercialized artificial lighting, daylight and four-package white LEDs which consist of long-wavelength pass dichroic filter (LPDF)-capped, phosphor-converted red, amber and green LEDs (pc-LEDs) and a blue LED. We show that these tunable four-package white LEDs produce a tunable circadian effect for melatonin suppression/secretion, a high color quality for color perception/reproduction, high efficiency for energy savings and tunable figures of merit for the smart LED lighting market.