Innovative Projects Realized

Mitigating the risks associated with radio-frequency cardiac ablation

A cardiac arrhythmia is defined as an abnormal heartbeat which happens when the patient’s heart beats too fast, too slow, or in other irregular patterns. Although arrhythmia can occur without any symptoms, it is typically associated with heart palpitations, chest pains, fainting or heart failure. One type of treatment option is an interventional catheter-based procedure, which involves a technique called cardiac ablation. In such procedures, a catheter is advanced from the groin area into the heart. Once in place, radio-frequency energy is delivered through the catheter to a specific location with the goal of re-establishing proper heart conduction. These procedures introduce inherent patient risks including cardiac tamponade, transient ischemic attacks, stroke and death. The goal of this project is to develop a novel device to mitigate some of the risks associated with cardiac

Agent-based scheduling in community health care

In this project, the intern will design a community health care scheduling system for the allocation of home visits to care givers in community health care. The system adopts an agent-based distributed system architecture which take patients scheduling preferences on time, location and care givers into account when assigning care givers to home visit appointments. In addition, the system will also provide care givers with the opportunity to express their preferences and availability constraints in taking service appointments. Home visiting schedule is generated through negotiation between patients, care givers and the agency. An iterative bidding mechanism is embedded into the system as the negotiation protocol. Once integrated with mobile devices, the proposed scheduling system will enable system users to update their preferences and constraints in a real time manner. The system will enhance patients’ and care givers’ experience by optimizing their preferences and accommodating their constraints in the schedule execution process and, at the same time, reduce the overall costs incurred in providing community health care services.

Methods for constrained scheduling optimization

This project involves researching and integrating constraints into existing route and schedule optimization software. The partner organization (Western Heritage) has developed software that calculates the shortest route and optimal daily schedule for home care workers visiting patients in their homes. These schedules must consider constraints for each worker and patient, such as: smoker, pet in the house, lifting requirements, gender requirements, etc. as well as constraints for multiple starting points for each worker. Integrating these constraints in to the existing algorithm requires research by someone with an advanced understanding of mathematics and geographic information systems. This research project will provide this. The expected benefit to the partner organization is development of a more valuable piece of software that will create revenue.

Characterizing hydraulic fracturing fluid greenness: Application of a hazard based index approach

Hydraulic fracturing of unconventional gas reservoirs utilizes a suite of chemical additives to accomplish specific engineered purposes. Chemical selection depends in large part on formation and operational characteristics but also on secondary non-technical properties, such as cost and environmental sustainability. Encouraged by industry level directives, oil and gas production and service companies are moving towards ‘greener’, i.e. sustainable hydraulic fracturing additives. It is not currently possible to adequately measure whether or not industry is in fact moving towards greener technologies. The proposed project will expand upon the previous work of UBC Okanagan to develop and validate a scoring database to comprehensively evaluate the greenness of all hydraulic fracturing fluid reports submitted to the FracFocus chemical disclosure registry. The proposed work will assist Oil and Gas companies to assess every fracture fluid report upon submission (approx. 500-600/yr), and yield a defensible assessment system that will permanently reside in the public domain.

Interaction-Indexed Search for Classroom Electronic Whiteboards

Recent technological advancements have led to widespread usage of interactive and collaborative systems in educational settings. In particular, SMART Technologies’ interactive products are being widely used at schools and universities across the country. Although this is a valuable achievement, it also presents new challenges to evolve these systems to new user needs. For example, one of the main challenges of the teachers using SMART systems in classrooms is the need to “go back in time” and review missed meeting or class material. This process requires significant time and effort, since there are pauses, exercises, and discussions that are less-important to the content of a session (e.g., when students are encouraged to discuss a subject in groups, then the teacher answers a question raised by a student, etc.) and do not necessarily need to be included in the session summary. Throughout this internship, we will investigate, design and test possible mechanisms to address this requirement. We expect to employ the results for further enhancements of the existing tools developed at SMART Technologies.

High Average Power – Frequency domain Optical Parametric Amplifier (HAP-FOPA)

The goal of this proposal is to make the most advantage of the recently developed technique of Frequency domain Optical Parametric Amplification (FOPA) by pushing this technology to unprecedented levels. The IP has been protected by the group of prof. François Légaré from INRS_EMT. The main inventor, Bruno Schmidt, has founded few-cycle Inc. to commercialize this disruptive technology in Canada. Prof. Légaré and few-cycle Inc. are the partners of the current proposal.
One particular aspect of this laser is its incredibly short pulse duration consisting only of few cycles of the electric field. The current state of the art of few-cycle infrared (IR) laser at the research level operate at average powers of a few watts. A commercial product is not yet available at IR wavelengths. The aim of this 2 year project is to increase the average power by one order of magnitude. Furthermore, the final setup shall fulfil all criteria associated with a commercial product, safe operation, remote control and reliable operation.

Single Frequency RTK Technology for Handheld GPS

Traditional GPS RTK requires two receivers one of which serves as base station. Assuming in-between separation is not too long, spatial correlations for GPS observation errors are pretty significant. Base station can be used to correct rover observations. As a result, 2-cm horizontal and 5-cm vertical positioning accuracy within 5-minute initialization time is available at rover.

However, two dual-frequency receivers are required in this mode. For applications concerning economical cost more than high accuracy, dual-frequency RTK is not optimum choice. Therefore, we propose to design a single-frequency GPS RTK system providing 5~10 cm positioning accuracy within 5-minute. The proposed work can reduce receiver costs by half. Moreover, this system can even save costs for base station installment if network RTK is already set up

In a word, our work is to design a low-cost single-frequency GPS RTK system with at most half price but comparable performance compared to traditional dual-frequency RTK.

Torsional Effects on Structural Self-Tapping Screws in Canadian Douglas Fir

With a growing concern to reduce carbon emissions, timber construction has is experiences a rebirth in Canada and abroad. The availably of engineered wood products, innovations in manufacturing, and changes in the building codes are some incentives for timber becoming a materials choice. Connecting these large timber members is done efficiently with the help of structural self-tapping screws. These steel screws, developed in Europe, are capable withstanding relatively high loads due to their unique design. They are rapidly installed without the need for pre-drilling hole with the help of the self-cutting tip on the screw. When inserted into timber, a considerable amount of torsional stresses are produced. The purpose of this study is to understand how these stresses impact the ultimate capacity of the screws. A series of experimental tests will be performed before and after the screws have been inserted into Canadian Douglas Fir under dry and wet conditions.

A Quality Assurance Framework for Care Process Management

Online business processes are different from traditional web applications and typical healthcare applications. Online business processes involve the collaboration of multiple user roles interacting with multiple services in parallel. They are usually implemented using Business Process management (BPM) technology that defines an explicit business process model to flexibly combine forms delivered through a web browser with services accessible through Internet protocols.
A quality assurance framework for BPM has been proposed in our previous work that will be adapted and extended for use at The Ottawa Hospital in partnership with IBM. It specifies formal modeling of requirements in terms of goal models and business process scenarios coupled with a well-defined service-oriented architecture. Test campaigns are model-driven from requirements, the business process model, user forms and the service-oriented architecture. The test campaigns are defined and supported by a test orchestration workbench that allows for flexible integration of tools to address multi-user, multi-service testing.

Evaluation of cyanide and thiosulphate lixiviant systems for KSM Seabridge gold circuit

Most of the gold that is produced by hydrometallurgical processes is recovered by cyanide leaching. However, the reactive nature of some minerals questions the applicability of cyanide technology for selected applications. The current research is designed to evaluate the cyanide technology as well as an alternative processing path for a particular material through extensive experimental program. The project will yield the mathematical models describing all chemical processes in each circuit, as well as mass and energy balances based on laboratory data and scientific reasoning. The models will assist identifying the most economical solution for the particular processing plant in BC.

Surgical prehabilitation of cancer patients undergoing surgical resection. Modalities to mitigate the level of anxiety and depression prior to surgery

There is emerging evidence from studies at the Montreal General Hospital supporting the effect of prehabilitation (also referred to as preoperative conditioning) on postoperative outcomes. Increasing physical fitness and optimizing nutrition in cancer patients before surgery can help patients feel physically stronger, return to their community functions sooner and potentially undergo adjuvant cancer treatment earlier than expected. However, a great level of preoperative anxiety and depression exists in our cohorts, and standard strategies, such as deep breathing exercises, are not enough to mitigate the impact of psychological distress. As the literature suggests, high preoperative anxiety and depression are associated with prolonged functional recovery, depressed immune function, more complications, and poorer quality of life. The present study has been designed to assess patients’ psychological status before beginning a 4-6 week prehabilitation program and to determine the impact of structured psychological intervention on functional, clinical and societal aspects of postoperative outcomes.

Travaux préliminaires à l’implantation du Learning Analytics Lab pour optimiser et monitorer l’engagement et l’apprentissage dans des environnements numériques

Si les TIC ont permis à la formation de devenir plus accessible et favoriseraient l’engagement et la motivation, les faibles taux de réussite en formation à distance (FAD) posent problème. Les environnements numériques (EN) utilisés dans les formations en ligne enregistrent systématiquement les traces informatiques des activités des apprenants, qui peuvent être combinés avec des données de questionnaire dans une approche de Learn Analytics. Le projet vise notamment à développer des systèmes et des interventions soutenant l’apprentissage, la collaboration et l’engagement des apprenants; à comprendre les stratégies d’apprentissage et de collaboration déployées par les apprenants ainsi que les usages qu’ils font des ressources d’apprentissage ; à mieux comprendre l’engagement et la motivation des apprenants; et enfin à développer et mettre en place un cadre d’évaluation de la qualité. Les résultats permettront d’évaluer les processus d’apprentissage en fournissant des éléments pour rendre optimaux l’engagement, l’apprentissage, et ultimement, la réussite.