Slipping into Summer

Posted on Friday, July 4th, 2014

Well it has been a hectic place here lately, but time to catch the blogosphere up.

VS 1Big Win, Winners all around: Back in April our after school program (#FlashForward) with The Ottawa Hospital had a big win taking 1st Place at the College’s Applied Research Day (April 11, 2014). Shortly thereafter the red carpet came out and the high schools teams (along with their College student mentors) presented their patient safety videos in the Algonquin Students Theatre to a panel of esteemed judges. It was a lot of fun and a great opportunity to engage local youth with the daily challenges in our hospitals, and I think all involved benefited greatly, I know I did. So look for an expanded #FlashForward program in 2015.

UxR Lab Funded: Thanks to equipment funding through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Office of Applied Research will be establishing a User eXperience Research Lab over the summer. The UXR Lab will provide students, faculty and external clients access to an amazing array of new technology for R&D related to usability of mobile devices (tablets, smartphone, wearables, etc.). The lab will include gesture controllers, self-tracking video cameras, video and audio recording for tracking user feedback, 3D Oculus Rift goggles, and innovative system that converts everyday walls and tables into giant touch screens. This lab is a collaboration between the College’s Health and Wellness Research Centre and the Design Centre. It will be used to assist the Health and Wellness Research Centre in working with clients in the healthcare industry to refine and improve user interfaces for health applications. It will also enable the Design Centre to conduct usability testing for projects focused on user experience (UX) design using state of the art multimedia technologies. Look for the formal grand opening early in the Fall.

VS3

Driving Health Innovation: In May, Algonquin College welcomed Polytechnics Canada to our campus for their annual conference. It was an amazing event including the opportunity to see bestselling author Matthew Crawford. His talk reminded us all about the value of work. Of course, there was also work to do, and the Health and Wellness Research Centre hosted guests from across Canada at the conference for a fireside chat on the emerging role of Polytechnics in driving innovation in Canada’s Health Care System. It was a great opportunity to see the amazing work being done across Canada in our Colleges and Polytechnics in the health technology area (to watch go heVS2re).

All this and I have not yet told you about our summer plans. Oh well, more on that later, suffice to say there are 7 amazing projects now underway you will be hearing a lot more about in the coming months.

Summer is here – please make it a good one.

– Kevin Holmes
Project Manager, Health and Wellness Research Centre

Comments

Comments are closed.