Innovative Projects Realized

L2M- Biomass-derived solvent for sustainable bitumen recovery

The collaboration between BioOilSolv and Innovate Calgary aims to revolutionize bitumen recovery processes in the oil sands sector by developing biomass-derived solvents as a more sustainable and effective alternative to traditional methods. Through this project, an intern will undertake several key objectives to propel the commercialization of biomass-derived solvent technology. Firstly, the intern will focus on developing a comprehensive understanding of end users’ needs, preferences, and pain points regarding biomass-derived solvents, thereby informing product development and marketing strategies. Secondly, the intern will design a robust and adaptable business model tailored to the unique needs of the market, ensuring sustainable revenue generation and maximizing shareholder value. Lastly, the intern will develop a comprehensive pricing framework that balances affordability, profitability, and market competitiveness for biomass-derived solvents, facilitating market penetration and revenue generation. By achieving these objectives, the project aims to overcome technological, market, and regulatory barriers, ultimately accelerating the adoption of environmentally friendly technologies within the oil sands industry. Through strategic guidance and support from Innovate Calgary, this collaboration will contribute to driving innovation, economic growth, and environmental stewardship, thereby benefiting stakeholders and communities across Canada.

L2M – A Modular and Low-Cost Carbon Capture Solution for Rapid Deployment

This project will support the development of a business strategy for a startup company based around the rollout of low-cost carbon dioxide capture technology. Through a series of workshops and from access to mentorship from individuals well versed in the start-up space, the intern/founder will gain crucial knowledge pertaining to the potential end users, structuring of business plans, IP management, and share structures to aid in the growth and stability of the company long term. Furthermore, this will give an opportunity for the intern/founder to gain the valuable soft skills not learned through research settings. The project will also benefit the partner, Innovate Calgary, in their mission to bring new technologies from academic settings into the world. Programs such as Lab2Market help garner a greater chance of success for the companies funded by Innovate Calgary by helping new companies navigate the entrepreneurial landscape.

Design and Development of a Secure Online Platform for Real-Estate Transactions

ExactDeposit is an online tool that enables real-estate buyers to pay deposits on real-estate transactions electronically via credit or debit card. In addition to facilitating the deposit transaction, it will allow real-estate brokers and agents to log in and view transaction statistics both in real-time and historically. The tool will provide a user-friendly online form to accept agent and buyer input from any devices (laptops/desktops/tablets/smartphones). After being processed by the ExactDeposit server, credit card and destination brokerage information will be sent to a 3rd party gateway for final payment processing. The developed system will utilize the functionality of the 3rd party gateway by making specific API calls. Once the transaction is over, a response will be sent to the ExactDeposit server for post transaction processing. Email notifications of a completed transaction will be dispatched to all stakeholders from the ExactDeposit system. The database within ExactDeposit will store transaction ID, and state of the transaction, including information related to client mapping to the brokerage and vice-versa. This system will give the real-estate buyer – a secure, yet simple and flexible means of sending deposit funds and give participating brokerages the ability access transaction statistics

Identifying barriers to abortion access for people in prisons in Australia

Women are the fastest growing prison population in both Canada and Australia. This heightens the need for gender-specific health care, including abortion care, for incarcerated individuals. In order to identify barriers to accessing abortion in prisons in Canada, I previously co-created an inventory of the facilities in Canada designated to incarcerate women and calculated the distance to known hospitals and free standing clinics providing procedural abortion services, and co-led an environmental scan of policy governing access to abortion in prisons. These analyses identified significant geographical and policy-related barriers to abortion access.
This project will apply these methods of identifying barriers to abortion access in prisons to the Australian context, creating an inventory of all facilities in Australia designated to incarcerate women and calculating distances to procedural abortion services, and validating the inventory and analysis by conducting interviews with key stakeholders in correctional women’s health in Australia. This project will also critically compare and contrast Australian and Canadian findings in order to identify key factors that may be differentially influencing abortion access. This project will benefit the partner institution by generating evidence on existing barriers to abortion access in prisons in Australia, which can inform future qualitative and quantitative research.

L2M – Asphaltenes-Derived Carbon Dots for Friction Reduction

Water-based lubricants have emerged as substitutes for petroleum-based lubricants in various applications such as hydraulic fluids, cooling fluids for metal cutting, and stern tube bearings in ship propeller shafts. My STEM tech business proposes an asphaltenes-derived carbon dots (AsphaDots) lubricant which intends to solve the friction and wear problems in steel and allied materials, which are widely used in sliding, rolling, or contact interfaces in industrial machinery, as well as natural and biological systems. It is important to solve this problem because friction and wear in moving mechanical systems have negative effects on durability, environmental compatibility, and efficiency. Most commercial lubricants are petroleum-based with inherent environmental concerns, difficult to dispose of waste (used) lubricants, and easily attract and retain dirt and wear particles. The increasing scarcity of petroleum resources and growing environmental concerns have prompted the development of alternative solutions for friction reduction. The business idea involved in solving these friction, wear, and attendant environmental problems is the replacement of petroleum-based lubricants with water-based analogues like AsphaDots. As customers are searching for petroleum-based lubricants alternatives, AsphaDots-based lubricants are non-toxic, cheap, and easily re-usable as their impressive hydrophilicity allows filtering of wear particles and dirt in waste AsphaDots lubricants. The current challenge in commercializing AsphaDots is the lack of funding to develop a prototype for large scale production. Currently, 10 g AsphaDots per batch can be prepared in our laboratory. And we hope to develop a prototype that enables the preparation of 10 kg per batch.

L2M – Virtual Reality Nursing Experience (VRNEX)

When newly registered nurses start their careers in hospitals, they face severe transition shock due to the huge gap between their learning from educational institutions and real-life healthcare environments. Due to insufficient resources for training these new nurses, hospitals suffer from a high new-nurse turnover rate and more frequent medical errors caused due to the unpreparedness of the new nurses.
To tackle this issue, this project is a step toward creating evaluation metrics that that utilizes cost-efficient virtual reality simulations and leverages AI with the input of various stakeholders including subject matter experts to measure the training effectiveness of non-technical skills such as communication, critical thinking, teamwork, leadership, etc; a priority skill requirements for new nurses. Ultimately, this will improve patient care quality by better-preparing nurses for the demands of real-world healthcare settings.

L2M – Revolutionizing Human Movement Analysis: A 3D Markerless, AI-Powered Approach with Mokapp

Mokapp is a revolutionary tool designed to streamline human movement analysis for healthcare providers. Our specialized motion capture (mocap) technology offers a portable, accessible solution that significantly reduces analysis time from hours to just 5-10 minutes. Using only two cameras and a web-based system, Mokapp stands out for its efficiency and convenience compared to traditional mocap systems. Our markerless approach, powered by cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence, minimizes the learning curve for professionals and provides swift, comprehensive data analysis. Mokapp offers pre-defined evaluation models for standard assessments used in physical therapy clinics, enhancing professionals’ ability to make informed clinical decisions.

Asset Management: Modeling and User Experience

Facing looming infrastructure crises, municipalities around the world are implementing asset management policies to maximize level of service to residents through optimized scheduling of maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement of assets. Scheduling optimization problems have been studied extensively in computer science and it is believed that an exact solution to such a problem would take an impractical amount of time to compute. However, several methods for finding approximate solutions have been proposed. This project will involve researching the needs of municipal asset managers, modeling infrastructure planning as an optimized scheduling problem, researching and prototyping modern algorithms for finding approximately optimal solutions to theproblem, and developing software prototypes to facilitate user interaction with the model. The industrial partner, Riva Modeling Inc., will benefit from this research as it will give their clients an interface to sophisticated optimization algorithms that will help preserve and extend the life of longterm infrastructure assets.

A socio-ecological approach to understanding determinants of homelessness in Prince Albert: A community-based research approach

This project explores the determinants of homelessness in Prince Albert (PA) using a community-based research approach. The aim is to understand the needs of people experiencing homelessness in the city, the impact of homelessness, the community assumptions about homelessness, and the opportunities and barriers to addressing it. Understanding homelessness in Prince Albert, the factors sustaining it, what resources are available regarding services, and local and global best practices needed to manage homelessness or care for people experiencing homelessness is crucial. About 30 in-depth interviews will be conducted with service providers and policy makers involved in addressing homelessness. We will review secondary data to explore employment initiatives and other preventative interventions to reduce homelessness. Our findings will provide policy direction and help service providers to better support people experiencing homelessness.

E-quester Business Building Internship

E-quester is on a mission to fight climate change by sucking a gigaton of CO2 out of the air annually by 2050 – that’s the power of 40 billion trees!

E-quester is a team of passionate researchers and engineers revolutionizing carbon capture with our innovative CO2 direct air capture (DAC) technology developed at the University of Toronto. Our captured CO2 will be permanently sequestered or reused to create new, lower carbon products.

Nature Positive Reporting Assessment

Veritree connects businesses with verified tree planting projects. By facilitating these partnerships, Veritree helps businesses incorporate nature-based solutions into their business models.Veritree is building its offering for two different client sectors, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) customers, whereby corporate clients opt to plant trees for CSR purposes. In such a scenario, Veritree needs to provide a robust monitoring system that shows that the restoration is having ecological and social impacts. This requires aligning with metrics and indicators that support ecosystem health, as well as adhering to good practices and supporting economic development. For the second target customer, Veritree is building its technology to support carbon and nature based disclosure reporting, with the future opportunity to license the technology to be used in Nature-based supply chains such as agroforestry, production forestry and oceans. In this scenario, there is a need to align with the ever evolving Environmental Social Governance (ESG) landscape for businesses to understand their land and marine based social and environmental risks. As such, the internship will provide opportunities to document current nature positive frameworks via metrics and indicators, conduct a case study on TNFD, and conduct a gap analysis between Veritree’s technology and current nature-positive reporting frameworks.

Analyse ergonomique du gilet pare-balles avec attaches polyvalentes

L’étude vise à analyser l’impact du port d’un gilet pare-balles (GPB) avec système d’attaches polyvalentes « Molle » sur les postures et les gestes des policiers.ères dans le cadre de leur travail. À l’aide d’une analyse ergonomique et de simulations comparant le gilet actuel et le GPB Molle, l’analyse vise à identifier dans quelle mesure le design du GPB affecte l’exécution du travail et favorise la genèse de douleurs ou d’inconfort. Il vise également à identifier les « schémas » de répartitions d’équipements sur le corps les plus efficaces, puis à élaborer des critères de performance d’un GPB répondant aux dimensions corporelles variées des patrouilleurs, puis à proposer des repères de conception ou de choix de gilet (textiles, dimensionnement et structure) qui permettront de répondre à ces critères.