Health Futures

University of Waterloo researchers take pride in identifying and solving significant, complex challenges facing humanity and our planet.

Recently, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) announced that seven Waterloo researchers will receive funding to carry out ground-breaking work to improve our nation’s health and strengthen our health care system.

The CIHR is Canada's leading federal funding agency, collaborating with partners and researchers to support health-care discoveries and innovations. 

Imagine a coat that captures solar energy to keep you cozy on a chilly winter walk, or a shirt that can monitor your heart rate and temperature.Picture clothing athletes can wear to track their performance without the need for bulky battery packs.

University of Waterloo researchers have developed a smart fabric with these remarkable capabilities. The fabric has the potential for energy harvesting, health monitoring and movement tracking applications.

Dr. Mark Ferro, School of Public Health Sciences associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health, is to receive nearly $1.3 million over five years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Now that ground has been broken on the Waterloo Eye Institute and construction is about to start in earnest, the University of Waterloo School of Optometry and Vision Science is moving its Waterloo campus clinic and all its specialty services to a convenient nearby location. 

Do you find yourself doom-scrolling, or spending more time than you should consuming negative news on the internet and social media and want to stop? Well, there’s now an app for that.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo have created Mindful Scroll, a mobile app that helps users transition from doom-scrolling to adding mindfulness into their daily routines.

It takes all kinds of helping hands to make the Olympic Games run smoothly, including alumni from the University of Waterloo. According to Statista, the Paris 2024 Olympics have created approximately 150,000 jobs across the globe.

Policy reform is urgently needed to assist older adults who live in southern U.S. cities and who experience higher-than-expected heat-related health issues if they don’t have adequate access to air conditioning, according to a new study by University of Waterloo researchers.  

The study’s findings lead the researchers to suggest policymakers mitigate extreme heat conditions and adverse health conditions for older adults by requiring air conditioning in all new residential home construction or by addressing the high costs of operating air conditioners.  

The University of Waterloo was founded to inspire and empower the next generation. With a commitment to bettering humanity and our planet, Waterloo is at the forefront of connecting the next generation of leaders to programs that will inspire the next gamut of solutions for us to thrive in a complex future. 

There’s a lot that goes into an Olympic athlete’s quest for gold – years of training and rigour – but also, an athlete’s age. A team of University of Waterloo students used statistics to figure out when an Olympic track-and-field athletes’ peak performance will be.

Track-and-field encompasses running, jumping, throwing, and combined event disciplines. Most athletes’ career performance progressions can typically be visualized as a bell curve, in which they train over several years to reach their best performance, or “peak,” at a certain age and then gradually decline.

The wildfire season of 2023 was the most destructive ever recorded in Canada and a new study suggests the impact was unprecedented. It found that four of the year’s wildfires in mine-impacted areas around Yellowknife, Northwest Territories potentially contributed up to half of the arsenic that wildfires emit globally each year.