Innovative Projects Realized

Motor-powered pediatric prosthetic knee joint

Prosthetic knees are essential for transfemoral amputees, enabling more natural movement, reduced energy use, and increased independence. Active prosthetic knees (APKs), which use motor-powered actuation to mimic muscle function, further improve gait efficiency, balance, and weight distribution—benefits especially crucial for children. However, current APKs are designed for adults and are too heavy and bulky for paediatric users, creating a gap in the market. Bionic Power Inc.’s Agilik device, a lightweight smart orthosis for children, shows promise for adaptation into a powered prosthetic knee. This project will evaluate the actuator’s performance for torque and battery life in a prosthetic context and aims to create the first pediatric APK, aligning with Bionic Power’s mission to enhance children’s mobility.

Développement d’une solution d’inspection de quais portuaires par drone sous-marin, photogrammétrie et intelligence artificielle

Le Port de Sept-Îles, premier port minéralier en Amérique du Nord, célèbre 25 ans d’indépendance. Depuis 1999, il mise sur l’innovation, le développement durable et des partenariats solides pour soutenir la communauté. Avec une capacité annuelle de 100 millions de tonnes, il joue un rôle central dans le développement régional et international. Dans ce contexte, le PSÎ ne cesse de promouvoir l’innovation pour par exemple améliorer ses procédés d’opération. C’Est ainsi que le PSÎ souhaite disposer d’une solution d’inspection de ses quais portuaires par drone sous-marin pour remplacer la solution traditionnelle qui consiste à employer des plongeurs qui sous l’eau prennent des images de ce qu’il considère comme des défauts : il en résulte une imprécision sur la localisation des défauts, une qualité parfois médiocre des images complexifiant donc l’évaluation de la criticité des défauts et une dangerosité pour les plongeurs. La solution d’inspection par drone sous-marin, photogrammétrie et entraînement de modèle IA permettra in fine, de générer un rapport d’inspection géolocalisant les défauts avec leur niveau de criticité permettant ainsi de planifier les opérations de maintenances de ces quais portuaires.

Airmarket-iART Safety Assessment

Transport Canada is the regulatory agency in Canada that oversees the certification of RPAS (Remotely piloted aircraft systems) and has presented a roadmap for RPAS manufacturers to demonstrate the evidence that a given platform can meet safety objectives. The project will be completed by the iART alliance and aims to develop the technical evidence required to produce this declaration, which is required to demonstrate compliance with the regulatory requirements set by Transport Canada. This will be done through an in-depth analysis to ensure system safety and reliability to produce the declaration to be submitted to Transport Canada by the manufacturer, Censys Technologies. Airmarket specializes in air traffic management for drones, ensuring that crewed and uncrewed aircraft can operate safely in shared airspace for BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) operations. BVLOS capability can improve Canadian lives, and applications of BVLOS operations include infrastructure monitoring, wildfire suppression, wildfire mapping, forest health assessments, and much more. This initiative will go beyond routine business operations by establishing a scalable framework that enhances safety and accelerates adoption for manufacturers. Given all the benefits of BVLOS operations, such operations are still high-risk and can result in serious complications if not conducted safely. This project will lay the foundation for successful BVLOS operations across Canada and will allow Airmarket to assess the safety and demonstrate the applicability of Saentaro aircraft in the applications mentioned above.

Emergency Department (ED) Wait Times at Waterloo Regional Health Network (WRHN) – ED Challenge

Despite numerous system interventions, emergency department (ED) wait times at Waterloo Regional Health Network (WRHN) remain a critical challenge. As part of an Innovation Partnership Procurement by Co-Design initiative led jointly with the University of Waterloo under the CareNext Coalition, WRHN is now engaging vendors and internal stakeholders to co-develop novel interventions that improve patient flow and care experience.
This project seeks to embed a PhD-level intern with advanced expertise in health systems, policy analysis, and clinical evaluation to assess the impact of pilot innovations. The intern will work closely with WRHN’s Innovation and ED teams to evaluate outcomes from both a clinical efficiency and user experience lens, while also identifying enabling or obstructive policy frameworks. The intern will be instrumental in informing procurement decisions and policy recommendations for scale-up.

Project Evaluation and Data Collection Support-Island FOod Network

The Island Food Network (IFN), based in Victoria County, Cape Breton, is one of the community partners delivering the province-wide Collaborative Food Network (CFN) program. Launched in April 2025, the CFN initiative supports community-led responses to food insecurity by promoting human dignity, choice, nutrition, adaptability, and efficiency in local food programs.

This project will evaluate IFN’s CFN programming during its first full year of implementation (April 2025 – March 2026). It will explore how IFN’s activities—such as food access initiatives, community meals, and outreach efforts—are helping to reduce food insecurity and build stronger social connections within the community. The project will collect both numbers and stories: how many people participated, how the programs were experienced, and whether they made participants feel included, respected, and supported.

A student intern will work closely with IFN staff and two academic supervisors from Cape Breton University to design and carry out the evaluation. This includes developing simple tools to document ongoing program activities, collecting feedback from participants, and analyzing the impact of the programming. The goal is to help IFN learn from its work, improve future programming, and meet provincial requirements for annual evaluation.

This is the first time the Island Food Network is participating in a formal evaluation of its CFN programming, but it builds on lessons learned from similar evaluations previously conducted in other Nova Scotia communities, including Glace Bay and Eskasoni.

Multimodal Sensing and Analytics for Remote Aquatic Ecosystem Monitoring

This project develops a unified multimodal sensory analytics framework to monitor remote aquatic ecosystems using video, sonar, and environmental sensors. By combining these complementary data sources, the system can operate continuously across a range of challenging conditions such as low visibility, night-time, or remote locations with limited infrastructure. The project is a collaboration between Simon Fraser University and the University of Hong Kong, advancing research in artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), edge computing, and environmental analytics. It supports student training, international knowledge exchange, and contributes to the development of scalable tools for fish monitoring, ecosystem assessment, and long-term environmental stewardship.

Understanding Counsellors’ Perspectives on the Mental Health and Wellbeing of Farmers: A Descriptive Qualitative Study

SaskAgMatters (SAM) Mental Health Network Inc. is a support network created to offer a farm-culture friendly mental health support system for Saskatchewan (SK) Agricultural Producers (hereafter collectively called ‘farmers’). SAM offers six free counselling sessions with registered mental health professionals who have backgrounds in agriculture. SAM’s counsellors will be invited to semi-structured interviews focusing on assessing and improving SAM’s service model. This project aims to define the strengths and limitations of SAM’s services, along with recommendations for future actions, for the next iteration of SAM’s 5-year strategy. The reason for this investigation is to enhance and expand SAM’s services and support for SK farmers and reduce suicide.

Strengthening Rigour in Mixed Methods Research

Mixed methods research—combining quantitative and qualitative approaches—has become increasingly important in psychology and the social sciences for addressing complex, real-world questions. However, there is no shared standard for defining and evaluating rigor across mixed methods studies. This project tackles that gap by conducting a Delphi study, an iterative method of gathering expert feedback to build consensus on best practices for rigor in psychological mixed methods research. Experts will evaluate proposed strategies, suggest new ones, and refine recommendations across multiple survey rounds, aiming to produce a coherent, community-informed framework.

Preliminary findings from a recent systematic review highlight why this work is urgently needed: although many researchers refer to concepts like “triangulation” or “reflexivity,” these are rarely defined or consistently applied, leading to methodological variability. The resulting framework from this project will offer researchers, educators, and policymakers practical, openly shared guidance for designing and evaluating rigorous mixed methods studies. By improving methodological clarity and transparency, this work will enhance the quality and credibility of mixed methods research, supporting evidence-based decision-making in areas like health, education, and social policy—both in Canada and globally.

A Scalable Nitrous Oxide (N2O) Emissions Predictor Utilizing Fuzzy Logic and Impulse Response Measurements

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a powerful greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 298 times that of CO2, significantly contributing to climate change through agricultural activities, particularly the application of fertilizers. Accurate and scalable prediction of N2O emissions is essential for sustainable agriculture and climate mitigation. Current methods, such as LSTM-DLM neural networks proposed in previous MITACS projects, are computationally intensive, require extensive training data, and depend on costly equipment throughout the entire season (e.g., LICOR gas analyzers), which limits their practical application. This proposal outlines a scalable, cost-effective approach that combines fuzzy logic and impulse response measurements to rapidly and accurately predict N2O emissions across diverse agricultural landscapes.

Business Strategy Internship @ The forever Group

The Forever Group (TFG) is a 30-year-old Canadian owned and operated consumer-packaged-goods company that currently generates $2.5 million–$3 million in annual revenue across North America, the UK, Japan, and other export markets. To achieve its strategic goal of reaching $5 million–$10 million in the next three to five years, TFG must overcome the operational friction created by siloed legacy tools—AccountEdge for accounting, Shopify and Squarespace for e-commerce, Freightcom and ClickShip for logistics, Faire and Amazon FBA for wholesale and marketplace sales. These disconnected systems require heavy manual data entry, human errors, and inconsistent reporting, which in turn hinder timely, data-driven decisions. The business has loyal customer base, but it is unable to scale the business due to these hindrances which only increase cost of doing business with scale.

Toward a Volatile-Based Pest Management Strategy for the Lesser Clover Leaf Weevil

This project will support research on a pest insect called the lesser clover leaf weevil, which damages red clover seed crops and currently requires frequent insecticide use. The goal is to develop a safer and more targeted control method using natural scent cues that the insects rely on to find mates and food. To do this, I will spend two months at Murdoch University in Australia, working with experts to study the weevil’s sense of smell at the genetic level. By identifying the specific genes involved in detecting scent, we can better understand which natural compounds might be used to attract or confuse the pest. This will lay the foundation for designing traps that reduce the need for insecticides, protecting pollinators and other beneficial insects in the process. The research also supports international collaboration between the University of Saskatchewan and Murdoch University, while providing advanced training in molecular biology and bioinformatics. This work will contribute directly to my PhD, lead to a scientific publication, and help bring practical, environmentally friendly pest control solutions to Canadian agriculture.

Oxygen vs. Metabolites: investigating Mechanistic Drivers of Skeletal-Muscle Hypertrophy in Low-Load Hypoxic Resistance Training

Many athletes and patients use blood-flow-restriction (BFR) cuffs to make light-weight exercise feel like heavy training, but no one is sure why this type of exercise causes improvements similar to traditional exercise. Is it because the cuff blocks oxygen from entering the muscle, or because it traps byproducts (metabolites) that signal the muscle to grow? Our project will carefully tease apart these two ideas. We will have volunteers exercise in four conditions: (1) regular exercise with low weight, (2) low weight with inflated BFR cuffs (similar to a blood pressure cuff), (3) low weight while breathing low-oxygen air (like training at altitude), and (4) low weight with inflated BFR cuff and low-oxgen air together. We will match the amount of oxygen within the exercising muscle between the BFR and low-oxygen conditions, allowing us to see whether the lack of oxygen or metabolite build-up is the real driver of strength and size gains. The findings will help Delfi, a Canadian company that makes smart BFR devices, fine-tune their algorithms so users from rehab spaces to elite athletes get maximum benefit with minimal risk, strengthening Canada’s position in cutting-edge sports-medicine technology.