News

A new monitoring system developed at Waterloo Engineering could save lives and significantly reduce health-care costs by quickly detecting infections in brain-injury cases in intensive care units.

About 25,000 hospital patients in the United States alone each year require drains to remove excess brain fluid due to traumatic brain injuries and other conditions, including hydrocephalus and brain hemorrhage.

People can collaborate with groups of wheeled robots to create art using an interactive system developed by researchers at Waterloo Engineering.

The robots trail coloured light as they move in response to a piece of music within a fixed area – which serves as the canvas – while a camera records them to produce a “painting,” or visual representation of its emotion.

A startup company founded by two Waterloo Engineering graduates has secured US $1.5 million in funding to help speed the development and adoption of its self-cleaning technology to make solar panels more efficient.

Swish Solar is based in Kitchener and has acquired customers in multiple countries in North America and the Middle East since it was launched last year by Miswar Syed and Amirhossein Boreiri (both MASc ’24, electrical and computer engineering).

Technology developed at Waterloo Engineering uses radar and artificial intelligence (AI) to unobtrusively monitor people in hospitals and long-term care facilities for early signs of health problems based on how fast they walk.

“Walking speed is often called a functional vital sign because even subtle declines can be an early warning of health problems,” said Dr. Hajar Abedi, a former postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering at Waterloo.

Travis Ratnam (BASc ’06. electrical engineering) remembers the first time he felt self-conscious about his grades.

In elementary school, the classroom bully went through everyone’s report cards, “trying to figure out who the dumbest kid was and concluded it was me,” he says.

Ratnam is using lessons learned from that early setback to help other children as the co-founder and CEO of Knowledgehook, a software platform that uses artificial intelligence to help teachers uncover each student’s unique learning needs.

Tony Capel (BASc ’70 and MASc ’73, electrical engineering) is the recipient of the 2021 Lord Kelvin Award from the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

John Yeow, a Waterloo Engineering faculty member and the Canada Research Chair in Micro and Nanodevices, has been honoured with IEEE Canada’s Outstanding Engineer Award for 2020.

The Ontario Advanced Manufacturing Consortium (AMC), a joint partnership between McMaster University, University of Waterloo, and Western University, is helping to accelerate industry adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies, which will create jobs and strengthen the province’s reputation as a leading manufacturing region.

Since AMC was launched in April 2017, nearly 100 companies have benefited from the advanced manufacturing experts and state-of-the-art facilities at Waterloo. 

Waterloo Engineering faculty members have become new fellows of IEEE and the Engineering Institute of Canada.

Kerstin Dautenhahn, a cross-appointed professor of electrical and computer engineering and systems design engineering, was named an IEEE fellow for her contributions to social robotics and human-robot interaction.

Weihua Zhuang of Waterloo's electrical and computer engineering department is a new fellow of the prestigious Royal Society of Canada's (RSC) Academy of Science.