Innovative Projects Realized

Advancing Digital Health: UX/UI Innovations for Gait Rehabilitation Technology

PROVA Innovations Ltd. is revolutionizing gait rehabilitation with WithinStride™, a smart insole that provides real-time gait analysis and biofeedback to help individuals improve mobility and reduce pain. This project focuses on enhancing the user experience (UX) and interface design of WithinStride™’s mobile and web platforms, ensuring that both clinicians and patients can seamlessly interact with the system for more effective rehabilitation.

By optimizing the visualization of gait data, improving accessibility, and streamlining digital workflows, this project will increase user adoption and engagement, making telehealth rehabilitation more intuitive and impactful. Led by Andrew Iammancini, this initiative will refine the front-end development of WithinStride™, incorporating usability testing and clinician feedback to create a responsive, patient-friendly digital experience.

This project supports Canada’s growing digital health and med-tech ecosystem, helping drive innovation in home-based rehabilitation while reducing healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes.

Summer student internships at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum: developing practical skills for students, and strengthening partnership with the University of Regina

The Friends of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum would like to offer a series of summer student internships that bring university students and recent graduates into a museum setting, to gain hands-on experience alongside research scientists and curatorial staff at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. This experience will focus on developing collections across multiple units at the museum, including Archaeology, Ethnology, Palaeontology, Invertebrate Zoology, and Vertebrate Zoology. The internships will cover a wide range of topics that connect the museum to multiple departments at the University of Regina. Each unit will conduct an internship project that focuses on collections at the museum, and getting students to help build these collections through activities such as identification, cataloguing, rehousing, preparing, and collecting in the field. Beyond the focus on training students, these activities will differ from the day-to-day activities of the museum in that the collections involved will largely be targets for future research projects (setting up for collaborations between museum curators and other academic partners or co-supervised graduate students), or the work will address roadblocks that are making the museum collections inaccessible to a wider range of researchers and the public. These training opportunities are important because they provide experience that is not currently available in a university setting, and they prepare students for a wider range of careers. Removing collections roadblocks is important because it allows a wider range of researchers to use the data associated with museum collections, and address research questions relevant to Canada. It also allows these researchers to contribute to collections at the museum, ensuring that their data and research materials are preserved in perpetuity and made freely available to everyone.

Social Media and Marketing Plan for Community Futures

Community Futures Ventures, located in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, recently hired a new General Manager and moved to a new, more visible, location. These changes offer Community Futures Ventures (CFV) an opportunity to promote their services more widely within Yorkton and east central Saskatchewan. CFV’s greatest challenge is exposure and awareness within the community. While Community Futures Saskatchewan hosts a website with links to each local Community Futures branch, CFV in Yorkton has no social media presence and only limited digital marketing. CFV’s website, www.cfsask.ca/ventures, has multiple outdated or blank pages and much of the content is text-focused. At the same time, CFV is working with cumbersome administrative processes that require streamlining and organizing. The purpose of this project is to develop a strategic communication, digital marketing, and social media plan to promote CFV as a local, approachable, and convenient resource for loans, training, advice, and programs for entrepreneurs in east central Saskatchewan. The intern will also be ideally situated to assess the current administrative processes and develop streamlined processes for CFV. The Mitacs intern will gain hands-on experience in working as a marketing professional and insight into marketing as a career while learning valuable transferable skills, such as communication, problem solving, and teamwork.

Building Software for delivering real-time climate risk analytics and projected financial losses

At Resilio Climate Solutions, we are developing a cutting-edge software platform for climate risk analytics to help organizations proactively assess and manage climate-related physical risks. This project aims to create a data-driven, AI-powered solution that provides actionable insights for municipalities, financial institutions, and insurance companies.
Through this initiative, a software intern will contribute to the development of advanced computational models and user-friendly visualization tools, enabling decision-makers to integrate climate risk intelligence into their planning and operations. The project will involve real-time data processing, predictive modeling, and an intuitive dashboard to present climate risk assessments effectively.
With climate change driving more frequent and severe weather events, decision-makers need access to reliable, science-based risk assessments to protect communities, assets, and investments. This software solution will empower stakeholders with predictive modeling, scenario analysis, and user-friendly data visualization to integrate climate resilience into their planning and operations.
The funding will support hiring a software intern who will contribute to the development of key system components, including data integration, and interface optimization. The intern will gain hands-on experience at the intersection of climate technology, AI, and infrastructure resilience, contributing to a solution that has the potential to mitigate financial and social risks associated with climate change.

Manufacturability Improvements and Assembly Workflow Design for Harvest Platform

The Harvest Platform is a fuel-less, carbon-free water heating solution designed to replace traditional gas-based heating systems in restaurant and hotel environments. The technology harvests and recycles waste heat from commercial cooking appliances, such as ovens and fryers, to reduce operating costs and greenhouse gas emissions in a cost-effective and scalable way. Based on a decade of research and development, Harvest Systems was spun out of McMaster University proceeding a successful research collaboration with Pizza Pizza Ltd and Thermal Electronic Corp, along with additional funding support from NSERC and OCE (now known as OCI). Currently, Harvest Systems Inc is focused on the $10.7 billion restaurant and hotel industry, where the platform acts as a drop-in replacement for traditional water heaters. As a pioneering Canadian manufacturer of waste heat recovery systems, Harvest Systems envisions a greener future by transforming waste heat into a valuable commodity. To achieve this vision, Harvest Systems has been actively engaged in pilot projects to demonstrate the technology in various restaurant environments and poised to launch their first commercial product in 2025. To meet the expected sales projections, this project will focus on improving component manufacturability and assembly workflow to reduce fabrication time and cost; thus allowing Harvest Systems to quickly scale production to meet the growing needs of the hospitality industry.

Prioritizing Test Cases to Enhance the Safety of Automotive Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are made of software components interacting with their physical environment. They are used in many domains: Automotive, energy, healthcare, and many others.
Within the automotive domain, the need for software is expanding. Software is transitioning from supporting infotainment systems to driving functionalities (e.g., cruise controller, automated pilots).
As the need for software increases, automotive companies are experiencing increasing problems in ensuring that their vehicles are sufficiently safe. Engineers must identify hazards and mitigate them sufficiently. This activity is complicated. Ensuring the safety of the vehicles is even more challenging with the advent of over-the-air (OTA) updates
This?? project?? aims?? to?? help?? software?? engineers?? testing their?? automotive systems. Our?? research?? question?? is?? to?? understand?? how test case prioritization techniques can help detecting failure-revealing test cases for automotive applications containing many software configurations frequently updated via OTA,?? and?? ?understand if these techniques can be extended to?? increase their efficiency and effectiveness by exploiting information encoded within Test Sequence and Test Assessment Blocks.?
This research project will strengthen the relations between Canadian and Italian Universities. It will foster exchange of research ideas between Canadian and Italian institutions and support the exchange of HQP.

Evaluation and enhancement of QReserve’s web accessibility standards

This project involves a student intern working with QReserve, a Canadian technology company providing resource management software, to evaluate and enhance our web accessibility standards. The intern, a Junior Software Developer, will collaborate with our development team to analyze the current software, identify areas for improvement, and implement changes to ensure the platform is accessible to a wider range of users. This enhancement will directly benefit QReserve by expanding our user base, improving our reputation for inclusive design, and ensuring compliance with accessibility guidelines, ultimately strengthening our position as a leading provider of enterprise-grade resource management solutions.

Needs Assessment for Treatments at Mucosal Surfaces

Understanding the needs of patients and the gaps in the current treatment options is critical to creating improved products for these conditions. This project will identify conditions where there is a strong product-market fit using OptimEyes’ proprietary drug delivery nanoparticle platform to address these limitations. These results will inform in-lab R&D activities that will create products that match the target product profile identified by patients and health care providers to improve treatments for these diseases.

Caractérisation de l’état de santé de Homarus americanus dans les conditions environnementales de Gros-Cacouna

Le projet vise à explorer la viabilité de la conservation de homards en mer. Le projet aurait lieu dans les installations de la Première Nation Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk au quai de Gros-Cacouna dans le territoire ancestral Wolastoqey. Le port de Gros-Cacouna est à la limite de l’habitat du homard. L’environnement, et plus précisément la qualité de l’eau, est critique au bon fonctionnement de ce projet commercial. Pour connaître l’état de santé des homards à Gros-Cacouna, nous allons les comparer à des homards de la Haute-Gaspésie. Des tests physico-chimiques permettront de connaître l’état de santé, tandis qu’un test de goût nous permettra de connaître la qualité commerciale.

Linking geologic history to geothermal resources in the Liard Basin, Northwest Territories, Canada

Canada’s northern communities are overly dependent on diesel fuel, which poses an economic threat in the event of a supply disruption (e.g., river flooding, forest fires). Therefore, the use of geothermal energy is an essential step towards independence and self-sufficiency. In the Northwest Territories, high geothermal gradients offer long-term, year-round heating and power for northern communities. Despite the discovery of such geothermal resources, many questions remain as to why only this area of northern Canada has such potential. In this project, I aim to address this question by combining geothermal information (e.g., distribution of geothermal gradients) with the geologic history of the Liard Basin region (e.g., temperature history, major geologic events, rock properties). By combining this information, I will expand the knowledge of how unconventional geothermal resources form, which can result in a blueprint for geothermal exploration in remote and understudied areas. This benefits Canada in its ongoing efforts to transition to sustainable energy sources. In addition to these broader benefits, this project will benefit research groups at the University of Calgary and the University of Bergen by providing detailed geologic information on the evolution of northern Canada and by implementing a novel numerical modeling approach to unravel geologic histories.

MXene-Supported Electrocatalysts for Enhanced Oxygen Evolution Reaction in Green Hydrogen Production

This project focuses on developing advanced catalysts for green hydrogen production by using MXene, a highly conductive nanomaterial, as a support for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. Efficient and durable OER catalysts are essential for water electrolysis, a key technology for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source. By combining expertise from the University of Toronto and the University of Tokyo, this collaboration will enhance understanding of catalyst design, improve energy conversion efficiency, and contribute to sustainable energy solutions. The partnership will also strengthen research ties between the two institutions, providing opportunities for knowledge exchange, student training, and future joint projects in clean energy technology.

ESROP – KMUTT – Assistive Devices for the Elderly (FoG Prediction and Cueing Device)

A common symptom of Parkinson’s Disease is freezing of gait (FoG), which entails that patients freeze while walking and cannot continue to walk. A way to stop the FoG is to prove some sort of external stimulus (cueing). This project entails the creation of a device to detect FoG (based on previous devices) and provide somatosensory cueing to the user in order to manage FoG. This would be built into a smart-watch like device, as an assistive device for the elderly.