Health Futures

Today is World Hemophilia Day under the theme ‘Access for all: prevention of bleeds as the global standard of care’. Dr. Andrea Edginton, Hallman Director at the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy, uses her research to help pharmacists, doctors and nurses manage treatment for hemophilia patients that has, in turn, helped these patients lead a better quality of life.

What is hemophilia?

Athletes are often at risk of experiencing sports-related concussions — a type of traumatic brain injury (TBI) that can result in temporary or persistent symptoms and can have a lasting impact beyond physical symptoms.

In 2011, Felicia Corrado (BPH ’19) sustained a concussion during a ringette game. She had persistent symptoms: chronic headaches, nausea, light sensitivity and ringing in her ears. Corrado had difficulty going through the recovery journey on her own, where her symptoms resulted in multiple stressors in her life.

The University of Waterloo and Velocity are officially expanding their presence in downtown Kitchener today with a groundbreaking event at the new Innovation Arena building on Waterloo's Health Sciences campus. 

Every March since 2016, students from Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy have been volunteering and visiting Region of Waterloo schools to educate the younger generation on what pharmacists do during Pharmacy Appreciation Month (PAM).

This year during PAM, 30 pharmacy students volunteered and presented to more than 400 elementary students across nine schools in the region.

From faster and more accurate disease diagnosis to models of using health care resources more efficiently, AI promises a new frontier of effective and efficient health care. If it’s done right, AI may allow for more people-centred care and for clinicians to spend more time with people, doing the work they enjoy most. But to achieve these aspirations, foundational work must occur in how we operate today and in defining what health care looks like in the future.

In an age of misinformation, knowledge translation (KT) is an increasingly important way to communicate research to the audiences who need it.

Knowledge translation links the creation of knowledge from research areas to real-world situations. With increased specialization and the level of disciplinary-specific training required to engage with research findings, KT is a purposeful approach to bridging communication gaps between disciplines and with public audiences.

Engineers are harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and wireless technology to unobtrusively monitor elderly people in their living spaces and provide early detection of emerging health problems.

The new system, built by researchers at the University of Waterloo, follows an individual’s activities accurately and continuously as it gathers vital information without the need for a wearable device and alerts medical experts to the need to step in and provide help.

A Velocity health-technology startup is designing a new kind of self-adjusting socket for prosthetics.

The company, Vessl Prosthetics, identified a common concern for many amputees who use prostheses – poor socket fit. As Vessl’s CEO and co-founder Sydney Robinson explains, the limb inside the prosthetic can shrink throughout the day. For many amputees, that can mean a poor fit and discomfort.

The Waterloo School of Pharmacy implemented a mass vaccination clinic for COVID-19 immunization in 2021.

With many multidisciplinary teams working together in an environment not built for such a complex clinical system, researchers at the University of Waterloo created an app to support front-line workers. The app streamlined information flow to help solve logistical challenges that arose.

Waterloo’s globally recognized startup program Velocity launched an initiative that aims to help new companies in the health-tech sector access funding and get products and services in the hands of those who need them.

The initiative – Velocity Health – was officially launched at a kickoff event at the University of Waterloo. The latest stream of the Velocity suite of platforms was created to address the key challenges health-tech startups face.