Innovative Projects Realized

Evaluation of the mechanical properties of the bone-implant interface in lower limb amputees

Prosthetic limbs can provide a tremendous improvement in the quality of life and mobility of amputees. The conventional method of attaching a prosthetic limb is a socket that is custom designed to fit to the residual limb. Difficulties with socket fit attachments has led to the use of titanium implants as an alternative method for the attachment of prostheses. Using skin-penetrating implants, the prosthesis is attached directly to the bones of the residual limb. The use of these types of implants for attachment of lower limb prosthetics is now being performed in several centers world-wide. The success of these implants relies on a structural integration between the implant and the living bone. Evaluation of the integrity of the bone-implant interface is important to prescribe loading, to identify the risk of failure, and to monitor the long-term health of the implant. However, there are currently no methods available for clinical assessment of implant stability in lower limb amputees. The proposed research makes use of an experimental-numerical approach to provide a non-invasive measure of implant stability. The benefits to the partner organization will be the development of a clinically useful tool for monitoring implant stability that may potentially be commercialized and marketed

Workplace of the Future

Applying advances in ambient intelligence technologies, this research aims to design and develop a smart workplace to optimize not only physical comfort in employees but also participant happiness. Through ubiquitous monitoring of ambient factors and affective states a number of important research questions associated with designing and developing a smart workplace will be tackled. By developing robust intelligent solutions, notably using deep learning networks, capable of detecting, analyzing, and acting in real-time on the acquired data in a context-aware approach, the research results will provide designs optimizing environmental and organizational parameters according to feedback from a human-in-the-loop system.

Digital Youth Engagement Strategy Using a Critical Pedagogy of Place-based Perspective

The Atlantic Publisher’s Digital Youth Engagement Strategy (APDYES) is a partnership of Atlantic Canadian publishers, designed to digitally expand the reading experience of today’s “digital natives,” or youth. The strategy requires the research on a diverse Atlantic Canadian youth public to support the discoverability of Atlantic Canadian authors and other creative book content contributors in the digital realm and enhance this demographics’ experience of reading in general.
This research will be the foundation of an ongoing digital engagement strategy for Atlantic Canadian publishers with youth based in Atlantic Canada. The research project will mine information from a diverse youth public (aged 12 to 25) from across Atlantic Canada. It will involve researching best practices of digital engagement as these practices relate to encouraging the youth public to read – and particularly, from a “critical pedagogy of place”-based perspective. The results of the research project will be used to expand the digital influence and viability of Atlantic Canadian authors and publishers, while also supporting the grounding of Atlantic Canadian youth in a digital critical pedagogy of place.
To this end, the intern will use key components of Steve Blank’s Business Model Canvas — the development of a customer discovery process, and the testing

Transcranial Direct Current Simulation as an add-on treatment to Cognitive-Behavior Therapy in first episode Major Depressive drug-naive patients

Principal Investigator: Sandra Carvalho (PhD), School of Psychology, University of Minho, Gualtar Braga, Portugal

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious and debilitating illness that affects citizens worldwide. In Portugal, depression can be found within 7% of the population and has been linked to over a thousand deaths every year. In order to reduce the adverse effects often caused by pharmacological treatment, the student will collaborate with the Principal Investigator and host supervisor in a clinical trial of 72 drug-naïve and first-episode MDD subjects. The clinical trial will consist of two groups of 36 subjects each: one will be treated with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), a common non-pharmacological treatment for depression, and the other will be treated with either sham or active transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive neuromodulary technique that has been shown in past studies to treat MDD. The goals of the project are to study the clinical effects of both treatments separately, using the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), as well as their effectiveness in combination, using primarily resting-state EEG and fMRI.

The Binary Fluid Ejector- a novel thermal-driven heat pump for low-energy distillation: Influence of binary fluid thermodynamic properties

There are two common technologies that use thermal energy directly to produce cooling – absorption chillers and steam ejectors. Both are old technologies that suffer from serious limitations. MRT is developing a novel Binary Fluid Ejector that can overcome the limitations of prior art to produce a heat pump that can economically harness renewable thermal energy, including waste heat, to do useful work such as air conditioning, process chilling, or distillation/desalination. MRT constructs & tests a demonstration distillation system of a type applicable for treatment of waste and process effected water currently generated by Oil Sands Mining and SAGD operations. The specific research to be performed by the Candidate is to conduct modeling work necessary to design and optimize the precursor ejector prototypes required for concept validation prior to comprehensive design and construction of the demonstration system.

Evaluation of Cultural Change Interventions in the Workplace

Habanero Consulting group is partnering with Postdoctoral Researcher Ryan Taylor and Professor Bryan Gick from the University of British Columbia, and Fernando Nieto Morales from the Colegio de Mexico. They will apply the most current research from the social sciences to strengthen Habanero’s cultural transformation techniques and create a tool to more quickly and accurately diagnose impediments to organizational improvement. The project aims to achieve this through the identification of beliefs that underlie common problematic behaviours in organizations and scientifically backed means to transform these problematic beliefs and behaviours.

Comment optimiser les impacts du bâtiment durable en gestion immobilière ?

Ce projet a pour but de fournir aux propriétaires d’immeubles existants une analyse des meilleures pratiques visant à mieux valoriser les impacts d’un projet d’amélioration de la performance environnementale écoénergétique de leurs bâtiments et leur permettant de mieux justifier leur décision d’investir les sommes nécessaires pour le réaliser. Une étude détaillée des meilleures pratiques mises en oeuvre pour valoriser le bâtiment durable a été effectuée suite à l’analyse des 40 entrevues menées auprès de propriétaires et de locataires de 10 immeubles exemplaires situés au Canada, aux États-Unis et en Europe. Pour faciliter le transfert des connaissances et la transition écologique, les partenaires ont été de plus invités à participer à deux ateliers de co-création et ont reçu un document pouvant les guider d’accompagnement pour leurs projets de bâtiment durabl

Mitigating Ship Strike Risk in Southern Resident Killer Whale Habitat

The number and size of commercial ships transporting goods to and from ports in the Salish Sea continues to grow. Additionally, there are considerable industrial developments being planned in the region, including a major port expansion, and an oil pipeline terminal under consideration. These trends suggest more ship traffic, and with this comes an increase to cetaceans in the risk these vessels pose for collisions. Key amongst these cetaceans is the endangered population of 76 Southern Resident killer whales (SRKW), for whom much of their designated critical habitat overlaps with these shipping lanes. The aim of this MITACS proposal is to collate data from different existing acoustic hydrophones operating in the Salish Sea, as well as visual observer data from experts in the field to develop an advance warning system of potential ship-SRKW overlap. The spatial and temporal SRKW data from the region will serve as the foundation for how best to build a real-time movement model for an advance warning system predicting the location and direction of movement of any SRKW in or towards a ship’s path, thus allowing time for pilots to reduce ship speed and adjust their path.

Requirements management and lab testing of optical breadboard hardware for satellite systems

Using simplified language understandable to a layperson; provide a general, one-paragraph description of the proposed research project to be undertaken by the intern(s) as well as the expected benefit to the partner organization. (100 – 150 words) A series of Mitacs interns will be testing the capability of a range of sub-components and prototype systems to meet the performance requirements for an optical satellite communications terminal for deployment on low-earth orbit. Over the course of the project, the interns will successively march closer and closer toward the design of a functional and cost-competitive solution. Tests, which may commence under static conditions and at standard temperature and pressure, will increasingly be used to confirm system performance in the harsh environments it will face, such as high vibration at launch and wide temperature fluctuations and exposure to vacuum on orbit. A successful conclusion to the project will help position Honeywell to secure a significant share of the burgeoning market related to the transformation from the use of small numbers of large geo-spatial satellites to handle communications applications, to the deployment of constellations of hundreds of low-earth-orbit satellites.

Probiotic treatment of mothers influences maternal care: Implications for postpartum hormone regulation and offspring stress resiliency

Probiotics are a form of good bacteria that have been shown to have health benefits in offspring that have been exposed to early life stress. One such form of early life stress that has a lasting impact on offspring stress resiliency is poor maternal care. Based on unpublished research from our laboratory, we have found that probiotics have a positive impact on the quality of a mother’s care towards her offspring.

Effects of Probio’Stick® and Diet on Health Outcomes after Chronic Stress Exposure

Research shows that the gut, the brain, and the collection of bacterial species that inhabit the gut (i.e., the microbiota) affect mental and physical health. Furthermore, stress seems to exasperate these disorders and this relationship may be explained by the unique connection between the gut, the brain, and the microbiota). In this experiment, we will examine how Probio’StickTM administration throughout the lives of rats can impact their response to unhealthy (high-fat or high-carbohydrate) diet and chronic, life-long stress). We are interested in how this probiotic may improve health outcomes related to diabetes, obesity, and anxiety in response to diet and stress. Through an industry collaboration, we are interested in helping Lallemand Health Solutions (Montreal, Canada) expand research on their probiotic, Probio’StickTM with respect to chronic stress and un

Using Deep Learning to Leverage Data Transfer and AI in Smart Vehicles

Smart autonomous vehicles have now become a reality while the efforts are ongoing to improve the safety, security, efficiency, and performance. In the fast paced digital world, all devices including the vehicles generate a huge amount of data every second which has to be analyzed, stored, and communicated with other devices to reach the next technology milestone. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), and Vehicle-to-Device (V2D) communication protocols enable such communications for the smart connected vehicles. Ongoing research is focusing on further optimizing the information processing and data transfer technology to build a scalable and fault tolerant smart vehicle information system that uses a cloud infrastructure and massive parallel stream processing. We will build deep learning models to extract useful knowledge and data patterns from streaming vehicular data with a view to create a minimalistic and standardized dataset that can be efficiently transferred to other vehicles or to the cloud infrastructure for further analysis.