News

Two retail and technology veterans with roots at Waterloo Engineering are using the lessons they learned to help retailers ensure corporate plans are efficiently executed at the store level.

Jeremy Pee (BASc ’99, mechanical engineering) and Herman Paek (BASc ’99, electrical engineering) launched Thri5 in 2024 after experiencing frustration in their careers with the costly disconnect between head office and individual stores.

A homegrown success story written by an alumnus of Waterloo Engineering marked a major milestone – cumulative revenue topping $1 billion – by unveiling a public sculpture yesterday at its headquarters in the David Johnston Research and Technology Park on the north campus.

TextNow was launched 2009 as a co-op placement by student Derek Ting (BASc ’10) to help pay his bills while he was earning his undergraduate degree in computer engineering at Waterloo.

Waterloo Engineering researchers and medical clinicians are collaborating on a testing tool to help assess the viability of donated lungs and potentially improve patient outcomes in transplant cases.

The new device, called MetaboSense, was developed during a joint project involving Waterloo researchers and doctors at the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, including its leading lung transplant program.

A team led by two Waterloo Engineering professors has developed a battery-free sensor with promising potential applications to expand the reach of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

“The legacy approach to sensors relies on local gateways and batteries, limiting scalability, adding environmental burden and increasing maintenance overhead,” said Dr. George Shaker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

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).