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Discover more stories about Mitacs — and the game-changing innovations driven by students and postdocs.
The challenge: When static data isn’t enough
Headquartered in Quebec, Baüne is a Canadian space and defensegrade human health technology company building autonomous health intelligence for Earth and space. Its core platform, the Autonomous Care Unit (ACU™),), leverages AI SystemLevel Autonomy (AISLA) and proprietary Health Knowledge Graphs to deliver realtime, preventive, predictive, and diagnostic care when clinicians or connectivity are unavailable, even far from our home planet.
To simulate the human experience during a diagnostic process, Baüne is developing a human digital twin (HDT), a smart health and human performance subsystem of the ACS™ that creates a virtual version of a person using multi-modal real-time data from wearables and sensors, voice inputs, medical records, environment, and genetic information.
This subsystem is designed to help people stay healthier – both on Earth and in space – by predicting risks which can support:
- differential diagnosis (a list of diseases or conditions that could explain a condition)
- prognosis (the likely course of a disease), and
- personalized treatment recommendations.
The HDT sources from a knowledge graph based on static data (i.e., symptoms, risks, and diseases sourced from medical literature), but it does not include quantitative streaming data generated by various sensors and devices that capture data on health metrics and environmental conditions to ensure timely and tailored healthcare (i.e., continuous heart rate or temperature measures).
Baüne’s main challenge was ensuring integration between the knowledge graph and the continuous sensor data streams. This allows for actionable treatment plans based on full picture, personalized insights.
The solution: A Mitacs intern’s innovative approach
To address this gap, Abideep Singh Kondal joined Baüne’s team through the Mitacs Accelerate internship program as part of his master’s in in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Concordia University. Singh Kondal worked alongside Baüne to develop a Quantitative Sensor Information Graph (QSIG), a system that models the structure of sensor data following standards like Open mHealth, an open-source platform for mobile health data integration
Singh Kondal also implemented semantic sensor ontologies (a method for describing observations, in terms of sensors used and procedures executed) and mapping rules to symptoms and risk factors. Reasoning algorithms can then identify risk of disease based on the current sensor’s observations and the relations between symptoms, risks, and diseases.
“At Baüne, our hiring pipeline often begins with internships through Mitacs or similar programs,” said Aurelian Balondona, CTO at Baüne. “We define and propose university research projects that are closely aligned with our technical needs and product roadmap, and we cosupervise the work to ensure outcomes are practical and deployable. We partnered with Mitacs and Professor Paula Lago at Concordia University to bring Abideep onto a project specifically designed around the features we required.”
This work contributes to the development of HDT technologies, where continuous health data can be interpreted to better understand an individual’s health state and potential risks.
The outcome: Improved healthcare solutions that address real-world challenges
QSIG has been successfully deployed within Baüne’s platform, transforming it into a system capable of monitoring continuous health data.
“My Mitacs internship at Baüne allowed me to bridge academic research with real-world innovation in digital health by working on systems that transform physiological sensor data into meaningful health insights using knowledge graphs and AI models. It was incredibly rewarding to see how ideas from research can be applied to build technologies that support autonomous health monitoring and future healthcare systems.”
Abideep Singh Kondal
The collaboration between the Mitacs internship program and Baüne proved so valuable that Abideep was hired on full-time to continue scaling the solution a testament to the real-world impact of his research and the workforce support of partnering with Mitacs.
“The results mapped directly to our system requirements, making the value immediately clear,” said Balondona. “Based on this success, we hired Abideep fulltime to continue developing and scaling the solution within the organization.”
A key part of a Mitacs internship is to provide opportunities for hands-on industry experience while advancing R&D towards commercialization. For Baüne, the internship accelerated a core technical breakthrough; for Singh Kondal, it was an opportunity to apply his classroom learnings to real-world health challenges.
About Mitacs
For over 25 years, Mitacs has helped grow the economy and develop the workforce of tomorrow, connecting industry with academia and global partners to solve real-world challenges. We support business-academic research collaboration through internships, co-funded with businesses, for undergraduate to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.
As a national innovation connector, Mitacs takes a talent-first approach to strengthen innovation capacity and drive global competitiveness. We serve as an essential research-commercialization bridge, accelerating market entry and growth for new products and services.
This is a critical time for Canada to think big and take bold action. Mitacs is ready to help build a strong and resilient Canadian economy, powered by ideas, talent and innovation.
Mitacs is funded by the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta, the Government of British Columbia, Research Manitoba, the Government of New Brunswick, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Government of Nova Scotia, the Government of Ontario, Innovation PEI, the Government of Quebec, the Government of Saskatchewan, and the Government of Yukon.
