Innovative Projects Realized

Virtual Mental Health Services for At-Risk Populations: Accessible and Free Psychotherapy

Those living with homelessness and in precarious housing situations experience several barriers to accessing psychological care despite often needing support for their mental health. Some of these barriers include lack of funding to pay for services and difficulty physically accessing services. Providing mental health care virtually, can reduce these barriers by making services more accessible and affordable. However, for homeless and precariously housed individuals these services are likely still difficult to access because of lack of technology and private space to receive services. This project seeks to address these challenges by providing access to free virtual therapy in secure places for members of this community in Windsor, Ontario. In completing this project we will, evaluate the benefit of treatment for those who access it and with our research partners, assess the potential for scale-up of this treatment program to other settings.

Improve customer data warehouse creation

We are seeking someone who can work closely with our founding engineers to enhance the various methods we collect and process data from customers.

Specific tasks will include conducting secondary and primary source research on data sources of interest (data silos). Tasks will also include producing validation that data sources can be ingested from customer data silos, and are securly and accurately stored on our data warehouse solution.

Venture Studio Fellowship

This role is a critical and multi-faceted position. The intern will be an active contributor to the venture-building and studio asset allocation process. At the heart of FutureSight is a four-phase venture lifecycle – which systematically moves opportunities through ideation, validation, formation, and growth stages. New ideas are rigorously screened, market-tested, and validated before a venture is formed. Based on the intern’s strengths, they will rotate between the Studio fellow track or the EIR fellow track. As a Studio Fellow, they will support the studio team on operations, recruitment, capital raise & deployment, and investor relations. As an EIR Fellow, they will support a venture founder in testing business ideas and supporting co-creation activities.

Patient decision aid for musculoskeletal injuries in Mild Hemophilia

Hemophilia is a genetic bleeding disorder in which the blood flow is impaired from clotting. If you have hemophilia, you may bleed for a longer time than others after an injury. The primary goal of our work is to enable patients with the condition to make effective decisions when injuries occur. For instance, our proposed application will aid the patient to seek either immediate attention from a healthcare provider if the injury is a major one. Moreover, if the injury is not severe, then the patient will be guided to perform some activities that will lead to other decisions as to whether the patient is well or needs some self-assessment. This research puts the partner organization in a strategic position to broaden out their campaigns and services to patients with the condition of mild hemophilia

Sustainable Model for Hybrid Events and Transitioning workflow and process tools at Inspiring Communities

Inspiring Communities, a not-for-profit organization based in Nova Scotia, is a recognized systems change leading organization in Atlantic Canada. Their vision is of equitable, thriving communities founded on collaborative relationships, intentional, reflective learning and experimentation. Inspiring Communities builds collaborative relationships to foster positive social change through community-led initiatives and systems partnerships.
Inspiring Communities is an organization in transition. As we move from our start-up phase into our next phase of work we have undertaken processes to review and reorganize our workflows as well as aspects of our structure.We have been working in Google Workspace which made sense when we were a team of five or fewer people with less complex work. We now have increasing complexity in our work and some requirement to better protect our data and records. Additionally, we are not able to effectively manage our data and records through our google drive and work productively. Office 365 is a much better suite of tools for us and we would like support with research, feasibility and executing a move from workspace to 365 if it does indeed address our gaps and challenges.

Évaluation des besoins en capture et analyse de mouvement humain dans le contexte des arts du cirque

Au Québec, le secteur des arts du cirque a été fortement touché par la pandémie. Les industries du divertissement souhaitent créer des spectacles virtuels ou hybrides pour se réinventer. Pour ce faire, il est nécessaire de capture le mouvement des acrobates pour le retranscrire dans un environnement numérique, mais la technologie actuelle avec marqueurs sur le corps, est limitante. Le projet de recherche proposé a pour objectif de vérifier si un système de capture de mouvement sans marqueurs constitué de trois caméras à profondeur ZED2 est adapté pour un contexte des arts du cirque. Des mouvements acrobatiques seront enregistrés avec ce système et avec un système de référence avec marqueurs afin de comparer la précision de cette technologie et de tester ses limites. Les résultats de ce projet permettront de guider l’évolution des industries canadiennes et québécoises des arts et du divertissement à l’ère numérique.

Conversion DC/DC pour le solaire à concentration

L’objectif de mon travail est d’améliorer l’efficacité globale du rendement énergétique dans le domaine de l’installation de l’entreprise Stace, spécialisée dans le CPV (Photovoltaïque à concentration). Pour ce faire, la solution retenue consiste à insérer un étage intermédiaire de conversion DC/DC entre les panneaux CPV (en configuration série) et l’onduleur branché à chaque tracker. L’idée générale est de diminuer la granularité de la conversion pour éviter les panneaux bypassés en cas d’ombrage partiels et les pertes associées à un algorithme de suivi du point de puissance maximale (MPPT) non optimisé à grande échelle. Ces problèmes se sont avérés plus importants dans le cas du CPV, par rapport au PV classique.
L’étage de conversion ajouté étant également une source de pertes, il doit afficher le plus d’efficacité possible, afin d’affiner encore la granularité en mettant autant de convertisseurs DC/DC que possible. C’est dans cette optique qu’une architecture de conversion partielle DC/DC a été choisie. Elle permet d’utiliser un convertisseur nominal plus petit (par rapport à la conversion à pleine puissance), ce qui entraîne une augmentation du rendement (avec un convertisseur à 98% de rendement, et 30% de la puissance traitée, le rendement global de l’étage de conversion est d’environ 99,4%).

Detection and prediction of cybersickness in virtual and mixed reality environments using wearables

Virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR) systems have burgeoned over the last couple of years with applications in healthcare, gaming, telepresence, and skills training, to name a few. Within the skills training sector, for example, police/law enforcement training is an important application domain which has seen increased adoption worldwide. In Canada, Public Safety and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have invested millions of dollars to set up state-of-the-art VR/MR facilities to train the next generation of law enforcement agents. VR allows for different scenes, conditions, and maneuvers to be tested in one single physical location, thus not only reducing training costs, but better equipping trainees to handle unknowns. While the potential is there, existing VR/MR systems are known to induce motion sickness – known as cybersickness – on a large proportion of the trainees, especially females. As such, cybersickness detection and prevention methods are drastically needed in order to provide a more inclusive training environment. This project aims to solve this problem via the use of multimodal signal processing of wearable device signals.

Informing Researcher and Clinician Decisions to Interact with a Scholarly Publication: Identifying Preferences for a Journal Transparency Tool

Advances in healthcare and research are published in peer-reviewed biomedical journals all over the world. Our previous research shows that predatory journals, or fake academic journals, pose a threat to this. Predatory journals claim to publish high-quality research, but they do not follow accepted scientific publishing practices (e.g., peer review, indexing). If health decisions are made based on low-quality research published in predatory journals, this is a problem. When using a search engine, researchers and clinicians come across predatory journals in a variety of ways, including looking for up-to-date information or looking for a journal to submit to. A digital journal transparency tool, in our vision, could help clinicians and researchers decide whether to use an article to guide patient care, cite, or submit their own research to a particular journal. The tool would provide real-time data on a journal’s practises to aid in making informed decisions. The objective of this project is to identify researcher preferences for this journal transparency tool.

Hardware Implementation of Neural Network Algorithm for Ultra Low Latency Signal Classification

The CookieBox is an angular streaking detector developed for LCLS-II which extracts intrinsic characteristics from an X-ray shot. Those characteristics can then be used to classify and determine if the X-ray shot respects the pre-established experimental framework. However, to be of any value to the rest of the experiment, this classification must be done quickly, ideally less than 100 µs after the shot. Preliminary work demonstrated that our encoding techniques enable the use of very small neural network which shows great potential for fast and accurate classification. The proposed research project is to implement those already existing and functioning algorithms on dedicated hardware like FPGA.

Phagocytosis of asbestos and macrophage dysfunction.

Asbestos was once used extensively in the fabrication of a variety of products and materials. After being declared a carcinogen and linked with a variety of lung diseases more than 2 decades ago, the use of asbestos was banned in many countries. Yet, asbestos remains a public health concern worldwide and one of the leading causes of occupational deaths in Canada. The molecular and cellular mechanisms underlining asbestos pathogenic effects are poorly understood. The objective of this research project is to conduct an in-depth characterization of the phagocytosis of asbestos fibers in lung macrophages and determine the possible contribution of asbestos surface chemistry on the disruption of phagocytosis and macrophage dysfunction. Utilizing state of the art microscopy technologies combined with cell biology techniques, we will characterize the maturation stage of asbestos fibers-containing phagosomes inside lung macrophages and investigate its deleterious effects on cell membranes. Findings coming out from this research will aid to better comprehend mechanisms by which asbestos persists in the lung and causes disease and will foster opportunities in diagnostic and therapeutic interventions promoting lung health in the affected individuals.

Identification of enzymatic binding partners for a novel family of Arabidopsis ubiquitin ligases

Plants are fundamental to the survival of humankind. They create the oxygen we breathe, provide the food we consume, and supply raw materials for numerous industries. We want to know how plants cope with stress. This requires a deep understanding of how plant tissues and cells react to stress cues, which includes understanding how proteins work within cells. Through a collaboration between Queen’s University and the University of Freiburg, the intern will uncover how a group of signaling enzymes function biochemically, which will complement our ongoing work to understand how they influence normal growth and development in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Industrial agricultural systems are unsustainable and damaging to the environment, and we believe that a clearer understanding of stress responses will enable agricultural innovation.