Innovative Projects Realized

Updating the 2008 Prairie North Health Region Health Status Report

The purpose of the Health Status report is to provide a snapshot of the health of the population served by the Prairie North Regional Health Authority (PNRHA). Its vision of “healthy people in healthy communities” serves as the driving force of the report in hopes to better understand the social, economic, physical, political and cultural context within the PNHRA. For the intern, the PNRHA provides the necessary organizational environment, support, mentor and supervision to the intern in a public health setting while the student accomplishes the given project. The PNRHA is able to focus on other areas of importance and focus on its mission to achieve the safest and best possible care, experience and health for the community it serves.

Wireless Overhead Line Temperature Sensor Based on RF Cavity Resonance, Design Improvement and Measurement

A wireless sensor has been designed to monitor overhead line temperature. The economic importance of this issue is to maximize the power transfer capacity of the lines. The sensor has two main parts, a local interrogator and a passive battery-less sensor. The power to turn on sensor comes from interrogator. The sensor measures the temperature, and transfers the data to interrogator for signal processing. The measurement accuracy of the sensor is reported to be about 0.07°C. There are some sources of error in sensor measurements. One of these errors is due to environmental noises and wireless interference. The objective of this internship has two parts. First is using the designed sensor to do measurements in different sites to monitor temperature and find the effect of interference on the results. This part is going to be done in about 1.5 month. For the next half, these results are going to be used to improve sensor measurement accuracy and decreasing the effect of interference on results.

Development of a subject-centered social media

Developing subject-based social media requires proper interaction with the users by learning and analyzing their profile and dynamically incorporating their opinion. In this project, a crowd-based profiling of users with respect to their peers will be developed and confidence factor calculated based on the collective opinion of the crowd will be assigned to the individuals’ opinion. There is a prototype system already developed as a proof of idea. The intern will enhance the prototype by adding new functions and modules to it.

Large-deformation finite element modeling of seabed sediments for offshore oil and gas development

Large amounts of crude oil and natural gas are located deep beneath Canada’s ocean floors. Currently, the offshore oil and gas industry makes a significant contribution to Canadian economy. Proper geotechnical modeling of seabed sediment is very important for safe, economic and reliable development and operation of offshore systems. The proposed research will advance the technologies required in the design of offshore foundations and anchors, subsea pipelines and risers. It will also develop a finite element modeling technique for analysis of submarine landslides, which is considered as one of the major geohazard in offshore development. Four inters at Memorial University will receive training on offshore oil and gas developments through this research program. The partner organization (C-CORE) provides advanced engineering solutions to various sectors including offshore oil and gas production and transportation. Through the proposed research program the partner organization will receive advanced technical solutions, design approach and skills in the fields of offshore geotechnical engineering and soil/structure interaction.

This research project was undertaken and completed with a grant from and the financial assistance of Petroleum Research Newfoundland & Labrador.

The Adoption of Electronic Personal Health Records and Ontario Healthcare Practice Environments

The Centre is working with a health industry-funded global start-up company in the Health ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Sector to empirically examine innovationadoption during the implementation of the company's personal health record application into different health systems and practices within Canada. This comprehensive study will enable a detailed examination of the utility and impact of the company's personal health record application in advancing health professional practice, in actively engaging distinct patient or health consumer populations more directly in managing their own health and wellness, and in strengthening the dynamic of the patient-health provider relationship. With key analyses being performed across distinct health care systems and patient-consumer populations, the findings of this project will create and offer to the global start-up company, and the Health ICT Sector more broadly, the evidence of the processes and factors necessary for the adoption of personal health record applications.

Covering designs for efficient de-identification of health records

In Canada, research ethics boards vary widely in the way they interpret risk to patients when their personal information is being re-used for research purposes. However, many research ethics boards will permit information to be shared without consent when they believe there is a low risk of re-identification. PARAT is Privacy Analytics’ de-identification software tool. It automatically performs generalization and suppression on cross-sectional, longitudinal, and geospatial data. The program measures the re-identification risk in the database, and can simulate attacks under a variety of different assumptions. The development of smaller covering designs and their incorporation into the PARAT de-identification tool will allow Privacy Analytics to handle larger datasets than are currently possible. As such, Privacy Analytics will be able to market PARAT to bigger health organizations with more valuable data sets then would have otherwise been feasible. Our research plan is to adapt successful approaches used in other covering problems, such as Aickelin’s algorithm for the set covering problem, to the problem of computing covering designs.

Multi-Service IPv6 Networking for Metering, Distribution Automation and Future Applications: Capacity Evaluation

This project studies network capacity and throughput for newly emerging MSGN infrastructure including mesh planning strategies and how the number of hops and end-devices affects the overall throughput. The work includes developing the analytical framework, and confirmation through simulation and physical experiment, of proof-of-concepts in the smart utility lab IPv6 RF mesh test bed. During the course of this project, the intern will collaborate with SUL and BC Hydro engineers and staff, as well as industry partners Cisco/Itron. He will also participate in distribution automation yard- and early field-trials.

Development and Calibration of DEM Materials Based on Rock Penetration Drillibility Parameters

Distinct Element Models (DEM) are a class of material models that represent the material as a domain of small elastic balls bonded by non-linear elastic springs with defined shear and tensile bond strengths. A part of this internship is a follow up work based on work done by another member of Advanced Drilling Group (ADG) member during his internship which was focused on researching a number of rock analogue materials and measuring 8 drilibility parameters, proposed by Baker-Hughes [2], for them. As a follow up to this work, the measured drillibility parameters are going to be used as a reference for creating DEM rock type materials. The standard procedure recommended in the PFC2d library [7] is going to be modified to be able to match the as many of drillibility parameters possible. These DEM materials can be used later in the rock cutting DEM toolkit [3] that has been already developed by this intern to further study the behavior of different rock types in a cutting phenomenon. The intern will also help the company for testing the new version of their software (PFC2D 5.0) with performing the same material calibration in the new software version. Finally, the intern will re-write his rock-cutting environment [3] existing in PFC2d 4 into PFC2d 5. The general intention of this internship is to publish this process and the result to the relevant conference or Journals.

Structured Assets’ Value-at-Risk: Measurement and Sensitivity Testing

This project aims to measure the credit risk of Sun Life structured assets portfolio. The objective is to evaluate the accuracy of different methods to assess the credit risk of these types of financial instruments and to evaluate their advantages and limitations. Two methods are proposed to assess structured finance assets risk: Loan Equivalent Approach and Look Through Approach. The former is a practical representation of the structured asset as a traditional debt instrument. The problematic is to test and understand to which extent this representation could diverge from the risk profile of the structured financial asset. A second objective is to implement the chosen model – through identifying the required parameters, assumptions, data and process – and integrate it into the company credit risk framework and insure its reliability and accuracy. By the end of the project/internship, we expect to have in place a fully operational model and procedure to measure securitized assets credit risk.

Characterization of a novel humanized monoclonal antibody specific to KAL 006: Impact on lymphatic metastasis in cancer

Cancer cells can travel to distant sites through the lymphatic system; this system is similar to a network of pipes within the body that carries fluids and cells to all organs. The metastatic spread of cancer cells through this network is one of the reasons why this disease is so difficult to stop. We are working with Kalgene Pharmaceuticals to test a new compound that can impact the lymphatic system. The hope is to block this network and thus stop metastatic spread thereby improving patient survival. We in partnership with Kalgene will provide the scientific and technical expertise in order to push this new compound to the clinic.

Pharmacodynamic distribution of docetaxel andcabazitaxel in prostate cancer xenografts, and evaluation of pantoprazole to enhance their activity

Chemotherapy drugs target and kill rapidly-dividing cells located closest to blood vessels, but do not penetrate deep into the tumor. Limited drug distribution in tumors is an important cause of drug resistance. A method to increase tumor drug delivery and combat resistance is the subject of this proposal. To counteract chemotherapy resistance, the use of an ulcer medication (pantoprazole) is being investigated. The objective of this proposal is to determine the drug effect of cabazitaxel using biomarkers that indicate where in the tumor a drug is working. The combination of pantoprazole with cabazitaxel will be investigated as a potential method to enhance drug delivery to tumor cells, thereby increasing the effects of cabazitaxel. These findings will be particularly valuable as they can be employed in designing strategies to overcome therapeutic resistance by modifying or complementing the limited spatial distribution of drug activity in solid tumors, and thereby increase therapeutic efficacy.

FlexMOSS: A Flexible Multicore Operating System Scheduler model for power efficient embedded devices

Battery life is a key concern for smartphone makers, and the power consumed by smartphone applications is directly tied to battery life. In this project the intern will develop fast, early and accurate models of smartphone power consumption, before the hardware and the operating system are available. These models will be useful for early optimization of smartphone applications and operating systems, thereby improving battery life, while meeting time-to-market constraints.