PhD student's app tracks COVID vaccine doses

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

A systems design engineering doctoral candidate has used his biomedical engineering background to develop technology to accurately track COVID-19 vaccine doses at clinics. 

Ryan Tennant, who holds undergraduate and master's degrees in systems design engineering from Waterloo, designed an app to "help alleviate the stress of end-of-day doses – to ensure that there are fewer or no doses that go unused.”  

“In some ways, running a clinic is like a math problem that you’re doing over and over again because your inputs keep changing,” Tennant says. “Talking to the staff and observing their tasks, I learned about several variables that can influence the final output of the equation.” 

He is currently pilot testing the technology at the Health Sciences Campus (HSC) Clinic, a regional vaccination clinic located in the University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy and led by the Centre for Family Medicine.  

See Running a vaccine clinic? There’s an app for that for the full story.