TORONTO (March 17, 2016) — QD Solar, a Canadian technology company created by the University of Toronto (U of T) and MaRS Innovation, has received $2.55 million from the Sustainable…
“Research labs across Ontario are full of ingenious – and even life-saving – inventions. Unfortunately, many of them never make it to market,” writes Wendy Leung in “These six great neuroscience ideas could make the leap from lab to market” in the November 20, 2014 edition of the Globe and Mail.
MaRS Innovation, which was created to help researchers solve exactly this problem, has a project with Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital that was featured in Leung’s article. Asim Siddiqi founded the anxiety meter app for children with autism.
Siddiqi recently competed in the Ontario Brain Institute’s OBI Entrepreneurs Program, funded in part by the Ontario Centres of Excellence.
Here’s an excerpt:
As much as 80 per cent of children with autism suffer from anxiety, but they often have trouble recognizing and communicating their anxiety states, Siddiqi explains. “Just like we sometimes have difficulty ourselves recognizing when we’re kind of stress-eating and things like that, they have it a little worse than we do.”
Using sensors on the body, Dymaxia’s anxiety meter picks up physiological signals, such as heart rate and skin conductance – or the amount of electric current that passes through sensors on the skin, which increases with stress and body temperature. It then processes those signals and provides feedback of the child’s anxiety state in real time on a mobile phone or tablet.
New research emerging from the University of Toronto’s Edward S Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is developing and demonstrating a new class of solar-sensitive nanoparticle.
MaRS Innovation is working with Professor Ted Sargent, his research team and U of T’s Innovations and Partnerships Office (IPO) to incubate and commercialize this and other solar technologies. Their work was recently published in Nature Materials.
The paper’s publication was widely covered in the technical trades, including CNET.com, Tech Times, Compound Semiconductor.net and Gizmag, among others, and on the university’s website.
Here’s an excerpt from power-technology.com:
Led by post-doctoral researcher Zhijun Ning and Professor Ted Sargent, the research work resulted in the development of a new form of solid, stable light-sensitive nanoparticles, known as colloidal quantum dots.
Developed in collaboration with Dalhousie University, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the solar-sensitive nanoparticles are cheaper than the traditional panels, large and rectangular.
In addition to being cheaper, the colloidal quantum dots are more flexible solar cells, and better gas sensors, infrared lasers, infrared light emitting diodes and more.
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