Projets novateurs réalisés

Climate Change Adaption for Masonry Material, Construction and Design

Climate change is having an affect all aspects of everyday life. In some regions, climate change could also have a negative impact on buildings. To help cope with these expected issues, we will be reviewing the Canadian masonry design standards in order to identify specific aspects of masonry construction that need special attention in their design to ensure our buildings continue to be durable as the local climate in various regions across the country changes. This project will bring together a developing masonry researcher, the expertise of the Canada Masonry Design Centre (CMDC), and staff from the CSA Group to study and report on the necessary changes. This project will benefit the CMDC by promoting the use of masonry construction, and the CSA Group will be able to use the final report to aid in the development of the next updates to the Canadian masonry design standards.

Hospital Acquired infection rates in Acute Care Centers

Audits of rural acute center in Maidstone and Turtleford to determine true rates of hospital acquired infections; Audits of hospital acquired infections in North Battleford, Meadow Lake and Lloydminster, to validate present reporting procedure and provide recommendations based on collected data. These data will be assessed and analyzed. This will provide a good opportunity for standard program planning, implementation and provide a yard stick for program evaluation as well as the development of policy within prairie North Health Region for the control of hospital acquired infections

Extraction of alternative biomarkers from a functional description of homeostasis

Type II diabetes affects around 9% of the North-American population. While it may be reversed by a change of life style and diet, it can cause irrepairable damage if left untreated. Tests that involve taking multiple blood samples are usually administered to find out if a subject has, or is at risk of developing, type II diabetes. We will develop an alternative test that relies on data from a wearable patch that estimates the blood sugar level continuously as the subjects go about their daily business. Three interns will develop the software to parse blood glucose data and extract the information we need to assess a subject’s blood sugar regulation. This work will strengthen the reputation of Klick Health as a leader in health tech innovation and, potentially, lead to the filing and commercialization of a patent on extracting early warning signs for type II diabetes from easily obtained data.

Safe and Effective Enclosure for Electric Baseboard Heaters

Vent & Cover wants to develop in conjunction with UBC and UWO, an enclosure that can slip over electric baseboard heaters and create a safe-to-touch exterior while still allowing the heater to heat the room safely and effectively. The project will have 2 major components, the first of which is to develop an efficient thermal design that redistributes the heat safely. The second component is to determine the optimal material to compliment the design and maintain the objective of a safe-to-touch exterior. At the conclusion of the project, Vent & Cover intends to patent the enclosure and develop new markets in both Canada and the US through direct and distributor sales. In addition, Vent & Cover wants to be the leader in reducing burns to vulnerable individuals as well as accidental fires through the development of this safety enclosure for electric baseboard heaters.

WP 1.1.7 – High Speed and SPIC Packaging and Signal Integrity

The intent of this project is to address the high-speed electronic and photonic packaging portion of a silicon photonic transceiver solution that will explore new and innovative metro reach terabit optical modems.
Packaging is of utmost concern with regard to achievable optical modem performance and eventual costs. Ciena’s optical transceiver performance and cost will be defined by the quality of the packaging solution and the integrity of the signals from electrical dies, to silicon photonic, to module, then board interconnect. Packaging and signal integrity constraints have to be considered very early in the design and cannot be considered as an afterthought after the system has been architected and the chips are well in the design process.

In this project we would like to explore new and innovative packaging techniques for integration of electrical high bandwidth ICs and photonic ICs. The following will be explored very early in the architecture phase of the design:
• Micro ball
• 3D integration using TSV or TGV
• Interposer and MCM
• Power plane and signal integrity for high speed/high power CMOS chips
• Silicon photonic integrated circuit packaging

Chemical and biological characterization of the non-tetrahydrocannabinoid profiles of medicinal plants

We propose to perform detailed studies that characterize chemically and biologically and the unaltered ancestral plant species of the Cannabis genus. Chemically, these studies will provide the chemotype profiles for each parental species for a spectrum of non-tetrahydrocannabinoid compounds. Biologically, these studies will provide the pharmacological profiles for each parental species. These data will enable the development of medical cannabis and cannabinoids (the right drug and the right dose) that can then be used for clinical trials (the right person/disease) to ultimately identify the therapeutic role of cannabinoid based pharmaceutics in disease management (the right time).

CO2-responsive agents for uses in protective coatings

Solvent-based coatings are used for protecting transportation vessels, buildings and infrastructures. They give glossy and durable coatings to protect materials, but their continued use is dangerous to workers and causes environmental damage. Environmentally friendly and safer water-based alternatives exist, but they are less durable and suffer from inferior performance. Unfortunately, the process used to make water-based coatings requires the use of surfactants, which cause the performance problems. We use a novel CO2-responsive surfactant that switches to a non-surfactant as the coating dries. For the first time, a high performance water-based coating can be made that may replace certain solvent-based approaches. The research and development in this coating will be critical in giving industry an alternative coating technology that is more environmentally benign and safer than current coatings.

Isolation of endophytic bacteria from corn grown in high and low yielding sites of SouthernOntario

Corn is widely used in many industrial sectors, especially in the production of alcohol in countries like

Canada. Corn production involves heavy application of chemical fertilizers which accounts at least

20% of the energy costs to a producer. Usage of biofertilizers may be one alternative for reducing

production costs. The objective of this proposal is to study microorganism communities present in the

rhizosphere and endosphere of corn, grown at high and low yielding sites in South Western Ontario.

The intern will be involved in various aspects of the initial phases of the research, including collection

of samples, processing of samples and isolating endophytic bacteria. This will enhance the efforts of

the industrial in the collection and analysis of the results and Significantly boost the research effort.

Commercial-Scale Spatial Atomic Layer Deposition Technology

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed atmospheric pressure spatial atomic layer deposition technology for depositing thin films that are nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick. Notably, the developed equipment can deposit these films rapidly, over large areas, in open air. This technology can be useful in a number of sectors, such as display technologies, smart windows, microelectronics, and solar cells. In this research project, the intern will use information collected through the Lab2Market commercialization program to make improvements to the technology that will help bring it to market. This will include the development of a new “reactor” that will improve the quality of the deposited films and the speed and efficiency with which they are deposited.

Promising practices for addressing social isolation among community-dwelling older adults

As Canada’s population continues to age, social isolation among older persons is being increasingly recognized as a concern. Social isolation affects over 30 percent of older adults and is associated with a range of negative health outcomes, from loneliness and depression to increased mortality. The overarching objective of this project is to identify promising practices for addressing social isolation in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Specifically, the project seeks to better understand the experience of people who are socially isolated and to learn what interventions have been shown to work, why and for whom. The knowledge produced from this project will support the development of community-based strategies to address social isolation in Fredericton and will contribute to the knowledge base on social isolation in Canada.

Optimum landmark placement for improving accuracy of pedestriandead reckoning in indoor localization

Localization is a technical to find the location of a target, such as a worker walking in a plant. For outdoor localization, satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) is commonly used. GPS does not provide good accuracy for indoor localization due to the complicated indoor environment that affects the GPS signal propagation. Currently, there are two types of indoor localization methods, one is based on existing indoor wireless infrastructure (such as WiFi), and another is based on data collected by motion sensors that are attached to the target object. Both methods do not work well in many industrial environments. The WiFi coverage is either incomplete or unstable due to physical limitation or strong interference caused by machines; while algorithms using data from motion sensors can cumulate errors that exceed a tolerable level within short distances. Combining both methods helps improve the localization accuracy, but still requires sufficient WiFi coverage. Placing landmarks at fixed and known locations helps recalibrate the latter method by resetting the error to zero or near zero. In this research, we will study how to minimize the cost to place the landmarks, while achieving the required localization accuracy.

Continuity of Care in Children’s Mental Health: Finalizing a New Measure

In Senator Kirby’s 2006 report, Out of the Shadows at Last, children’s mental health was labeled the “orphan’s
orphan” of Canada’s health care system. For over two decades, the systems-of-care philosophy in children’s
mental health has recognized the need to respond to a fragmented service system through greater integration and
coordination. Continuity of care, which is how a patient experiences care over time as coherent and linked, has
been identified as an indicator of health system performance and is considered an ethical principle of care. Yet,
no instrument exists to measure continuity of care as experienced by families receiving services through the
children’s mental health system. This deficiency limits efforts to understand, and ultimately improve, continuity
of mental health care for children. The development of the Continuity of Care Scale for Children’s Mental
Health, which is the goal of the proposed research, is an important step in measuring the integration and
coordination of services from the perspective of…TOBECONTINUED