Delos and KB Home Partner to Deliver Cutting-Edge Healthy Home Technology to the U.S. Home Market

NEW YORK, January 29, 2019 /3BL Media/ Delos™, a wellness real estate and technology firm based in New York, and KB Home (NYSE: KBH), one of the largest homebuilders in the United States, has announced a collaboration to introduce Wellness Homes to new homebuyers. KB Home plans to offer Delos’ DARWIN Home Wellness Intelligence Network in select KB Home communities in the California market, ahead of an envisioned national rollout.

DARWIN is a powerfully responsive platform that passively monitors and calibrates the home environment to help support the health and well-being of occupants. This first-of-its-kind system brings together a proprietary sensor-monitoring platform and solutions across air filtration, water purification, circadian lighting and comfort features. The collaboration marks Delos’ first partnership with a volume production homebuilder in the United States.

The wellness of homes is extremely important, with people now spending as much as 90% of their time indoors as countries like the United States become increasingly urbanized. DARWIN offers a fully-integrated, scientifically-supported solution to improve overall well-being.

“From years of experience and extensive research, we know that our indoor environments can impact physical, emotional and cognitive health outcomes,” said Delos CEO and Founder Paul Scialla. “Our collaboration with KB Home helps make DARWIN even more accessible and provides an incredible opportunity to help improve the health and well-being of everyday Americans.”

Delos is a title sponsor for KB Home ProjeKt, a full-scale, immersive experience of “where tomorrow lives” debuting in conjunction with CES this month. The home features DARWIN and is voice-enabled through the Google Home system. ProjeKt leverages the latest smart and sustainable living technologies to create a home that is designed to support health and wellness and adapts to its owner’s needs.

“The introduction of the DARWIN Home Wellness Intelligence Network is a natural extension of Delos’ leading science and research. Delos’ partnership with KB Home, an industry leader in sustainability, helps advance the company’s mission to make improved health, well-being and happiness available to all households,” said Deepak Chopra (Delos Advisory Board Member).

Leveraging Delos’ position as the pioneer of wellness real estate, and building on seven years of research with leading experts and institutions, the DARWIN Home Wellness Intelligence Network is a groundbreaking offering that seeks to turn your home into a catalyst for enhanced health, well-being and performance. Using proprietary software, wellness algorithms and sensor technologies, DARWIN has been engineered to integrate seamlessly into existing smart-home and smart-assistant platforms, or to stand alone in cases where smart-home technology is not installed in the home.

“We are pleased to offer Delos’ groundbreaking DARWIN Home Wellness Intelligence Network,” says Dan Bridleman, KB Home senior vice president of sustainability, technology and strategic sourcing. “At KB Home, we believe healthy home features will be an important component in the future of homebuilding. DARWIN is one of the core technologies implemented in KB Home ProjeKt: Where Tomorrow Lives and the response has been outstanding.”

KB Home has a long history of bringing health-oriented innovations to the production home market.  It was the first national homebuilder to commit to build exclusively with low-VOC carpet and paint; it is the only national homebuilder to receive EPA’s Indoor airPLUS Leader Award; and it is making well-being a core principle of KB Home ProjeKt: Where Tomorrow Lives. Healthy Home is one of the four areas of the KB Home eDifference sustainability platform, along with Energy Efficiency, Water Conservation and Smart Systems.

DARWIN focuses on four main components: air filtration, water purification, dynamic circadian lighting and comfort-focused technologies, all of which are designed to simulate natural outdoor conditions.

• Air quality sensors are installed in the home and are monitored by proprietary algorithms that intuitively recognize when air quality drops below pre-set levels and automatically trigger the air purification system to remediate poor air quality.
• Water filtration solutions are selected to remediate geographically-important water quality issues at all water sources in the home.
• Dynamic circadian lighting systems that mimic the natural sun patterns throughout the day are utilized to balance your sleep-wake cycle. Energizing bright light in the morning transitions to calming warm light in the evening to help your body produce melatonin and prepare for a restful night’s sleep, leaving you more rested, refreshed and recharged.
• Comfort-focused technologies in the bedroom, including dynamic temperature control and automatic blackout shades, create a supportive and comfortable sleep environment that minimizes disturbances and promotes restful nights. Dawn simulation scenes and sounds of nature provide a more natural and gentle way to wake up.

The DARWIN dashboard delivers the wellness status of the home and provides key information about how the home is performing, including real-time air quality monitoring, pollutant information and research-based wellness algorithms and experiences that can be customized to fit your lifestyle and needs. DARWIN can be controlled from a smartphone app, stand-alone tablet, Google Home integration and various home automation systems, giving you the freedom to control and access the dashboard from any room in your home. Key to DARWIN’s adaptability is a wide range of curated third-party products approved by Delos Labs, a multi-disciplinary research and development arm of Delos that collaborates with top industry experts as well as leading academic and medical institutions globally. Delos continues to engineer APIs into a growing library of compatible products and devices, as part of the DARWIN network.

Delos has fostered research collaborations with the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, a board of doctors from the Columbia University Medical Center and architects, scientists and wellness thought leaders to introduce wellness standards, programs and solutions into the built environment. Delos established the Well Living Lab™ in collaboration with Mayo Clinic — the world’s first lab committed to researching the real-world impacts of the indoor environment on human health, well-being and performance. The creation of The WELL Building StandardÔ (WELL) was one of Delos’ earliest accomplishments and industry-transformative innovations. The International WELL Building Institute was established by Delos as an independent, separately governed organization to continue WELL’s development and drive market uptake – with now over 1,200 projects in 45 countries, across over 250 million square feet of commercial real estate.  After the successful launch of WELL, Delos extended its research and program creation to more directly address the environmental impact our homes have on our health, well-being and performance with the release of the DARWIN Home Wellness Intelligence Network. Delos Labs created the DARWIN wellness algorithms in collaboration with experts from top academic institutions.