Waterloo Region is facing an acute housing crisis across the housing continuum. Waterloo Affordable Housing Living Lab (WAHLL) is an applied research collaborative aimed at understanding the local housing system to better enable investment in sustainable solutions. WAHLL is comprised of the Kitchener Waterloo Community Foundation (KWCF), Union: Sustainable Development Co-operative (Union Co-operative), and University […]

Due to COVID-19, adoption of and investment in technological solutions for remote mental health services (teletherapy) is rapidly increasing. While the evidence-base for teletherapy for individuals is robust, teletherapy research with families has been limited. Further, uptake of teletherapy by clinical training programs has been slow and knowledge about the feasibility of using these interfaces […]

This MITACS Accelerate program will support a internships for graduate students in the areas of services and applications using next generation communications, Internet, and cloud computing. The interns will be placed in Canadian telecom and networking providers and vendors and will undertake research projects defined jointly with these partners. The program will prepare graduates to […]

In the new reality of COVID-19 pandemic, contactless cooking and serving in food industry becomes a new essential prospect to reduce virus transmission by reducing human labor and human-food interaction. The goal of this project is to develop an intelligent robot system to manipulate tools and food items in a restaurant counter and kitchen environment […]

The project will develop a conceptual framework to quantify the value of nature based recreation. The tool will focus on improvements in physical health, improvements in mental health and health benefits associated with improved ecosystem protection. The tool will provide provincial, municipal and community organizations a mechanism to support informed program, policy and planning decisions […]

In this project, we plan to study and improve the existing Best Tests section of the Clinician Portal from Alpha Laboratories. Best Tests provides metrics to clinicians that allow them to compare the effectiveness and cost of their test ordering patterns. However, the problem is that many of these comparison metrics are not easy to […]

An area of exploration that can lead to a critical improvement in the way first responders can better respond to situations (e.g., fires, shootings, etc.) in indoor scenarios is in the development of intelligent indoor mapping systems that provide critical navigation details to the first responders. This enables first responders to not only plan out […]

Wearables are starting to include advanced haptic technology, touch feedback like vibrations, to help people create and listen to music, experience virtual reality (VR) environments, and improve accessibility for people who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing. Designing haptic feedback takes advanced knowledge about physiology and neuroscience that engineers and designers may not have access to. We […]

Spinal cord pathology causes significant burden to the individual and society-at-large. Treatment is complex and made more difficult by difficulties in clinical imaging of the cord microstructure. Using recent advances in image acquisition techniques and image processing toolsets, this project will investigate a semi-automated pipeline to visualize boundaries of spinal cord pathology for the purpose […]

[Reseach Abstract. Project Overview missing] simulation package available) to simulate a zooming system composed of tunable liquid crystal lenses that is capable of aberration correction. The first component of the project consists of simulating a liquid crystal lens in COMSOL. The liquid crystals rearrange themselves based on a space varying electric field created by the […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has created supply chain issues for medical masks worldwide. There is clearly a need for mask manufacturing and material sourcing capabilities in Canada. This proposal is a partnership with Feedband Labs to develop an enhanced ASTM 2-3 equivalent, antiviral medical mask that can be strategically sourced and produced in Canada. The 4-layer […]

Hydrogen technology in Ontario has incredible potential as an alternative energy source that can eliminate the use of harmful fuels and greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Canada is currently developing a nation-wide strategy to increase the adoption of hydrogen technology; however, Ontario is underrepresented in this discussion. Science Concepts International will work with its interns […]