Delos Australia expands wellness across human environment

Wellness pioneer Delos is expanding its focus from wellness technology in the home to a variety of industry settings including schools, childcare centres, aged-care facilities, workplaces and hotels.

Delos Australia President Bill Giannikos said, “We spend 90% of our time indoors. As a society in recent years we have become more concerned about the pollutants in our indoor environments — allergy rates continue to rise and we’re seeing firsthand how things like blue light impacts our moods, sleep and mental health.

“This is true whether you are at home, in the classroom or at work. Delos’s Wellspaces approach considers technological interventions that can remediate and improve the indoor environments in which we spend the majority of our time.”

Following successful global programs by the Delos US team to deliver more than 2500 Staywell hotel rooms within the MGM Grand, Marriott and Wyndham hotels — and most recently to deliver and install 10,000 air filtration units across 1800 schools in New York City for the NYC Department of Education in response to the city’s COVID-19 wave — Delos Australia is now undertaking its own expansion.

Partnering with audio visual and technology integrator Ci Group will enable retrofitting of Delos’s full suite of wellness solutions to its many clients, paving the way for more Australian indoor spaces to become healthier than ever before.

Ci Group Director Nicholas Guzzardi said, “Through our partnership with Delos, our clients will be provided the reassurance of evidence-based research in support of the wellness technology being offered. We very much look forward to bringing the benefit of state of-the-art Delos wellness solutions to more Australian indoor spaces than previously possible — individual workplaces, schools and universities, aged care, hospitals, hotels and more.”

Earlier this year, Delos completed the fit-out of Australia’s first wellness-enabled medical clinic for Medownick Laser Eye Clinic in Melbourne. Director Alla Medownick had become increasingly concerned about the impact of air quality at the clinic’s high-traffic location on Hoddle Street, one of Melbourne’s busiest arterials.

“The feedback we have had from customers since the system went in has been fantastic. They comment on how comfortable the environment feels and allergy sufferers cope much better.

“Awareness of air quality’s impact on our health and how it can irritate our eyes has increased since the 2019 bushfires. It made the decision to install the Delos ecosystem a simple one and we are enjoying the ongoing health benefits,” she said.

The Australian Delos team is currently in talks with education and aged-care providers, as well as a range of commercial partners, to continue to expand the footprint into non-residential settings.

The expansion has been enabled by the advent of new hardware — including an advanced HEPA-grade air purifier that focuses on capturing ultrafine particles. It features patented technology capable of trapping and removing particles as small as 0.007 µm at 99.99% efficiency, which is smaller than SARS-CoV-2 and other enveloped virus particle sizes.

“We are now on the cusp of a major change to the way we inhabit our environments,” Giannikos said.

“In moving to COVID-safe and COVID-normal, we anticipate great interest in how wellness technology can improve the quality of our indoor environments. We’ve always believed in this and now the everyday consumer, manager, homeowner, health professional and school principal are understanding the critical importance of operating in a healthy environment.”

Delos recently cemented two new partnerships that will enable the delivery of its original home wellness ecosystem to more homes across Australia.

Just this month it signed a partnership with United Solar Group that will see the Delos home wellness solution offered to energy customers alongside solar power, embedding home wellness into the sustainability movement. When solar panels go onto roofs, wellness technology including air and water filtration and circadian lighting can also be installed.

In another initiative, affordable housing start-up ShedLife will offer Delos’s wellness technology as standard to all customers as it begins its first builds this year. ShedLife aims to provide low-cost, affordable housing solutions to bushfire-affected regions, with the Delos deal meaning new homes in bushfire-affected regions will be among the healthiest in the nation.

ShedLife co-founder Steve Lastro said, “I’ve always had an issue with ‘healthy for the wealthy’ — wellness is not a luxury item. Having a healthy home shouldn’t be an upgrade, it should be a simple right. The home wellness movement is an important movement for Australian housing and I’m proud to be standardising it as part of the ShedLife offer.”

United Solar Group founder Richard Vargas agreed: “We provide our customers with solutions that are affordable and solve the issues people face today. We are not just offering customers an energy system that will save them money for 25 years, but an ecosystem that will improve their health — this coupling of energy and wellness has never been done before.”

United Solar Group will offer customers the ability to install a solar system and Delos ecosystem, with the savings in power helping to offset the cost so that wellness becomes an affordable proposition for every Australian.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Bonsales