Rusk

Wellness

For clients interested in healthier homes, Rusk provides engineered systems for site-specific water filtration, air filtration, lighting control and comfort products through its partner, Delos.

Rusk is the only Wellness Trained General Contractor in Manhattan, building the first Wellness Focused residence with Delos in 2012.

System Overview

The Solutions

Air Purification

Responsive Air Purification intelligently and efficiently targets particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, allergens, pathogens, and other air pollutants as they arise.

Clean air is essential to our health and respiratory comfort. Surprisingly, indoor air quality can be up to 5 times worse than outdoors. With microscopic particulate matter and allergens infiltrating our homes, as well as toxins and pathogens being emitted from household materials and furnishings, indoor air pollution is considered a top five environmental health risk globally.

Responsive Air Purification intelligently and efficiently targets particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, allergens, pathogens, and other air pollutants as they arise. Recessed sensors placed throughout your home measure indoor air quality and communicate with the DARWIN Hub to trigger remediation. Real-time environmental data and an indoor air quality (IAQ) score are accessible through the DARWIN app.  Acoustic insulation reduces ambient noise caused by the air filtration motor, preventing distraction to you and your family.

  • Air Quality Sensor: Discreet sensors continually monitor and measure concentrations of five critical air pollutants and communicate with the DARWIN Hub.
  • Air Purification: DARWIN Premier employs a three-stage filtration process including a pre-filter, HEPA/MERV 16 filter, and a high capacity activated carbon filter.
  • Reduces Pollen & Allergens: Targeting particulate matter that enters the home from outdoors helps deliver fresher and cleaner air throughout the home.
  • Targets Toxins & Pathogens: Household materials and furnishings can emit total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs). Removing them protects against both short and long-term health impacts.
  • Expels Odors: Offensive odors can affect your moods and sleep. Eliminating them can reduce stress and enhance overall well-being.
  • Responsive Purification: Continuous air quality monitoring technology enables the DARWIN network to remediate air pollution as it occurs.
Air purification wellness

Water Purification

Customized Water Filtration employs best-in-class filtration technologies tailored through on-site water testing, third-party laboratory analysis, and historical regional data, to deliver great tasting water that is healthier to drink, cook, and bathe with.

Water comprises over 50% of an adult’s body weight and we rely on proper hydration to ensure that our daily physiological needs are met. Although we often take the quality of tap water for granted, it can contain pollutants such as bacteria, heavy metals, and public water additives like chlorine, which can lead to a spectrum of short-and-long-term illnesses.

Customized Water Filtration employs best-in-class filtration technologies tailored through on-site water testing, third-party laboratory analysis, and historical regional data, to deliver great tasting water that is healthier to drink, cook, and bathe with.

  • Point-of-Entry Water Filtration: Comprehensive filtration of visible particles, key harmful metals, and chemicals such as chlorine delivers high quality water at every tap in the home.
  • Point-of-Use Water Filtration: Targets visible particles and chlorine, for fresher and cleaner water.
  • Cleaner Water: Filtration helps reduce contaminants, particles, and heavy metals.
  • Softer Hair and Skin: Reduced chlorine in shower water mitigates dehydrating effects when whole-home filtration is implemented.
  • Appliance Protection: Reduced particles, heavy metals, minerals, and iron rust helps protect your appliances and fixtures from build-up.
  • Savings for You & the Planet: Filtered water is more cost effective than bottled water and reduces the environmental impact on our landfills.
  • Great Tasting Water: Carbon filtration helps reduce the taste and odor of chlorine, for fresher, cleaner, and better tasting water.
Water Pruification

Circadian Lighting

Dynamic, circadian lighting mirrors natural sunlight patterns to promote your circadian rhythm, which helps regulate your energy levels, hormonal balance, appetite, productivity, and sleep quality.

Despite generations of evolution, our body clocks still rely on the natural patterns of sunlight to regulate our circadian rhythm, which synchronizes many aspects of our physiology, metabolism, and behavior, including our appetite, sleep, energy, and productivity. Today, we spend most of our time indoors with insufficient lighting or prolonged exposure to artificial light, which disrupts our circadian rhythm.

Circadian lighting mirrors natural sunlight patterns to promote your circadian rhythm, which helps regulate your energy levels, hormonal balance, appetite, productivity, and sleep quality. You can also choose from a menu of mood-specific wellness experiences. The best-in-class lighting solutions deliver exceptional color rendering to help enhance overall aesthetics in your home.

  • Circadian Downlight: Delivers dynamic lighting throughout the day, to help regulate your natural circadian rhythm.
  • Circadian Programming: DARWIN Premier algorithms enable the circadian downlights to transition dynamically throughout the day.
  • Circadian Switch: Automatically adjust your lighting to match the pattern of natural sunlight using a wall-mounted switch.
  • Energizing Mirror: A capacitive touch mirror emits bright light in the morning to help energize you for the day ahead.
  • Wake Naturally: Dawn simulation, our uniquely calibrated lighting sequence that mirrors the rising sun, will wake you gently from a deep night’s sleep.
  • Jump Start Your Day: Our capacitive touch energizing mirror emits bright light in the morning to help energize you for the day ahead.
  • Energize Your Day: Our bright daytime lighting is designed to help stimulate your mind and body, and to enhance focus and productivity during the day.
  • Relax & Unwind: Our evening lighting creates a warm, welcoming environment to help prepare your mind and body for rest.
  • Sleep Deeply: Subtle night lighting and minimized sleep disturbance help promote a supportive sleep environment for deep, uninterrupted sleep.
Circadian Diagram

Comfort Elements

Architectural details, technological interventions, and furniture, fixtures and equipment come together to cultivate a home environments that supports comfort, movements, sleep, relaxation, and mindful living.

The majority of our evolution occurred outdoors, shaped by the genius of nature. In modern times, we spend over 90% of our time indoors. This has had an increasingly negative impact on our overall well-being, with poor sleep quality becoming a public health concern. Exposure to bright artificial light during the evening and nighttime hinders the body’s ability to get sleepy, fall asleep, and stay asleep. Sleep is the body’s most restorative function; we owe it to our health to sleep well.

Architectural details, technological interventions, and furniture, fixtures and equipment come together to cultivate a home environment that supports comfort, movement, sleep, relaxation, and mindful living. The enhanced sleep system creates a transitional ambiance to prepare your body for restful sleep, mitigating environmental disturbances, light pollution, and blue light exposure.

  • Transition Gradually: DARWIN’s carefully orchestrated schedule of lighting, thermal conditions, and blackout blinds creates a transitional ambiance to prepare you for sleep.
  • Sleep Deep & Dream: DARWIN filters the air, mitigates light pollution, and regulates thermal comfort to help you get a great night’s rest.
  • Gentle Awakening: Our Dawn Simulation program wakes you at the desired time with incremental light and temperature, blackout blinds that open to admit natural light, and a biophilic soundscape.
  • Dawn Simulation: A carefully orchestrated schedule of lighting, blackout blinds, and biophilic sounds wake you gently at your set time.
  • Sound-insulating materials between adjacent rooms and sound absorptive surfaces limit echo and reverberation.
  • Cork underlay in wooden flooring provide ergonomic comfort and absorb shock and noise from footfall.
  • Blackout blinds with 0% visible light transmittance enable high-quality, restorative sleep.
  • Thermal ambience: A key environmental factor, is designed to enhance comfort and sleep quality.

Green Walls, Plants in an inorganic medium

Comfort Elements
Darwin premier dashboard image

The Control for Wellness

The ‘wellness brain’ of your home synthesizes communication across the DARWIN Premier wellness features to help optimize your home as a wellness ecosystem.

Engaging the advantages of IOT, DARWIN Premier is designed to integrate seamlessly with leading home automation systems such as Crestron, Lutron*, Savant*, and Control4*, to help evolve your smart home into a wellness home.

A dashboard embedded into your chosen third-party automation system gives you access to: an air quality index; key metrics to track wellness conditions across your home; customization of preferences; and wellness experiences such as circadian lighting and mood-specific programming.

  1. Wellness Algorithms: Years of research translated into algorithms that monitor, calibrate and respond to changes in environmental conditions across your home.
  2. Personalized Experiences: In addition to intuitive regulation of your indoor environmental conditions, DARWIN offers a range of curated wellness experiences to suit specific moods.

The Science Behind Wellness

  • On average, we spend about 90% of our lives indoors. [1]
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that genetics account for as little as 10-15% [2] of overall health outcomes, while 70% of our health is determined by our physical and social environments. [3]

[1] Report on the Environment Database, US Environmental Protection Agency.

[2] Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. (2014). NCHHSTP Social Determinants of Health.

[3] Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. (2014). NCHHSTP Social Determinants of Health.

  • Indoor air quality can be up to five times worse than it is outdoors.[1]
  • Pollens and other allergens infiltrate the home from outdoors, while toxins and pathogens can be emitted from material and furnishings.[2]
  • Even seemingly innocuous elements like odors can affect human emotions and sleep quality.[3]

[1] US Environmental Protection Agency. Ozone Generators that are Sold as Air Cleaners.

[2] US Environmental Protection Agency. Controlling Pollutants and Sources: Indoor Air Quality Design Tools for Schools https://www.epa.gov/iaq-schools/controlling-pollutants-and-sources-indoor-air-quality-design-tools-schools

[3] US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Cognitive Facilitation Following Intentional Odor Exposure. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3231408/

  • Microscopic additives and contaminants like lead and chlorine can be present in our tap water, affecting the taste, odor and ‘hardness’ of our water.[1][2]
  • When ingested, contaminated water can affect many body systems, including digestive, cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, and integumentary systems.[3]

[1] New York Times. America’s Tap Water: Too Much Contamination, Not Enough Reporting, Study Finds. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/tapwater-drinking-water-study.html

[2] The Guardian. Why does some tap water taste weird? https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/11/why-does-some-tap-water-taste-weird

[3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).(2014). Water-related Diseases and Contaminants in Public Water Systems | Public Water Systems | Drinking Water | Healthy Water | CDC.

Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/public/water_diseases.html

  • We evolved alongside the natural lighting patterns of the sun. These cycles of light and dark are critical to regulating our health and well-being. [1]
  • Modern living has a disruptive effect on our natural circadian rhythm (a 24-hour biological process that dictates our sleep-wake cycle), which can negatively affect our comfort, mood and alertness.[2]

[1] Brainard GC, Hanifin JP. Photons, clocks, and consciousness. Journal of biological rhythms. 2005 Aug;20(4):314-25

[2] National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Circadian Rhythms. https://www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/Pages/Factsheet_CircadianRhythms.aspx

  • The CDC has flagged poor quality sleep or sleep deprivation as a public health concern. [1]
  • Over-exposure to blue indoor light and screen time in the evenings suppresses melatonin, which can lead to delayed sleep onset, shorter sleep duration, feeling tired in the morning and lacking energy during the day.
  • Over the long-term, lack of sleep can lead to chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and depression.

[1] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).(2014). Prevalence of Healthy Sleep Duration among Adults. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6506a1.htm

Download the White Paper
Darwin wellness image-full width

Get Started with Wellness

After we collaborate with your design team to minimize the visual and mechanical impact on your project, we provide the drawings and specifications for your team to review.

Contact Rusk

Watch John Rusk moderate an in-depth seminar on Wellness at the AIA.

 

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