Parkinson’s disease (PD) affects 1 in 5 Canadians and this number is expected to increase as the population gets older. Diagnosing the disease early will lead to earlier treatment, better quality of life, and lower healthcare costs. There is currently no definitive test for PD. Doctors depend on looking for symptoms, such as trembling hands, to make a diagnosis. Early symptoms may be hard to see and look like the symptoms for other diseases. To help doctors find these early symptoms, Dynamiris has created a fast and easy-to-use tool, SimplyView, to screen for risk of PD.
Each year in Canada, approximately 40,000 people under the age of 24 will experience homelessness. Youth experiencing homelessness are highly vulnerable to crime, violence and sexual assault. Once homeless, youth are at high risk for multiple episodes of homelessness or chronic homelessness into adulthood. Interventions must be youth-centered, low-barrier, strengths-based, and prioritize diversion and/or family and natural supports to prevent long-term homelessness and its deleterious effects. One approach to prevention is through shelter diversion.
This project aims to propose a decision support tool for Nucleus Independent Living that optimizes the scheduling of clients visits, the assignment of PSWs to clients, and the routing of the daily visits of each PSW while trying to minimize the traveling distances for the PSWs, the number of different PSWs visiting a client, and the inequality between the PSWs’ workload (in terms of the number of client visits assigned and the distance traveled).
At St. Michael’s Hospital (SMH), having insight into patient flow throughout the hospital is essential to resource planning and operational efficiency. When patients are admitted, discharged, or transferred in the hospital, several actions need to be taken to ensure patients receive timely care and resources do not become backlogged. Improving patient flow reduces wait times, improves operational efficiency, and ultimately improves care. However, due to reasons like the epidemic outbreak, traditional methods of controlling the flow of patients are no longer effective.
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide, yet only one third of patients with depression receive care. This is because the traditional in-person format of mental health care delivery can be inaccessible, inefficient, and expensive. Electronic cognitive behavioural therapy (e-CBT) has been shown to be an effective solution to expand care access, efficiency, and affordability. Combining depression-based e-CBT with artificial intelligence, this study aims to develop an effective decision-making model that matches an individual’s needs with the right amount of care.
The project aims to identify various usability factors and how they affect user’s perception of the trustworthiness of the blockchain-based record and their intentions to adopt this technology. The study also aims in increasing our current understanding of how usability affects users’ perception of the trustworthiness of blockchain technology for personal health data sharing. The resulting datasets and other reported design implications can be used in improving features in existing wallets leading to further blockchain-based health wallets in the healthcare industry.
Social enterprises are businesses whose primary purpose is to create social and/or environmental impact. This study will seek to understand how to grow these businesses to create more social or environmental impact while being financially sustainable. This study will interview social enterprises to understand how they work, how they are trying to grow and what challenges they encounter while doing so. From the findings of this research, we hope to better understand how to strengthen the social enterprise sector in Canada.
A significant percentage of children around the world are affected by vision problems, such as lazy eye, that cannot be fixed by eyeglasses. When left untreated, vision problems may lead to learning difficulties. Vision therapy offers treatment to many of these problems where eye-trackers are tools used to diagnose and measure the progress of patients undergoing vision therapy for these vision problems. However, vision therapy remains out of reach for many patients due to the cost of eye-tracking services.
To address local food system issues like loss of farmland, people without enough food, or climate change impacts, it is important to see such issues as all related. This project will assess Durham Region food system resources, like local research and policy documents, to find strengths, areas to be addressed, and areas to be studied more. It will develop a more comprehensive picture of the local food system.
Orthognathic surgery is a procedure used to correct facial deformities and is a mainstay treatment in the oraland maxillofacial surgery field. Another common procedure in the field of oral and maxillofacial surgery is dentalimplant surgery that is used to replace missing teeth. Currently, dental implants are one of the most preferredtreatment options for recreating tooth form and function.The surgical procedure is complex and requires extensive planning and accuracy to obtain a successfuloutcome.
