But, until recently, Christina’s idea had been largely relegated to the pages of her PhD thesis and she’d since moved on to start teaching.

Research is essential in the natural products space, where consumers need evidence that products are effective and safe.

But for a small company, doing research isn’t simple. Projects and lab equipment are costly. It’s difficult to find and attract specialized talent. Making connections and fostering relationships between industry and academia is invaluable for a small company like Bend, which wants to maintain leading-edge work.

Mitacs postdoc boosts Bend’s capacity from within

The new tool uses a deep-learning computer vision system and motion-classification algorithms to capture events such as falls in real time, alert caregivers and give health-care professionals the information they need for immediate triage.

The system—developed in part by the Multimedia Research Centre led by Irene Cheng in the Department of Computing Science—transfers real-time video to an autonomous computer vision lockbox. If an event is detected, the system alerts a specified caregiver and provides a redacted video of the event.

Their systems help the makers of everyday technologies ensure that travel by road or air will be safe and reliable for Canadians and others around the world.

When they were approached by a major car manufacturer to develop testing systems for autonomous vehicles, OPAL-RT turned to Mitacs to connect them to the top research talent for their needs.

Norman called up his friend Mark Nathan, a cardiologist. 

“We put our heads together to develop the concept further,” said Dr. Nathan. “We were inspired by the idea of a cardiac stent, which is a sterile device used in heart surgery to allow arterial blood flow in patients with heart disease. Stents are different in all the important respects from what we had in mind, however; as with stents, we wanted to create sleeve-like scaffolds that can wrap around a stud, contain and release effective medication, dissolve predictably, and disappear.”

The app will use audio stories, such as podcasts, to enable users to communicate and feel as if they are doing the same activity at the same time, even though the activity might be taking place at different times in different places. For example, a mother and daughter living in different cities can hike together, with the mother initiating the story during her earlier hike and the daughter able to listen to her mother’s account while she herself goes for a hike.