SOLVING A PRACTICAL PROBLEM
Innovacorp’s Spark Innovation Challenge winners announced
Carbon-neutral boat engine a Sparks Cape Breton winner.
For both Scott Aucoin and Paul Travis, seeing a practical problem facing a sector and proposing a potential solution has been key to their success.
They are working in very different fields, but they were both among the winners in Innovacorp’s Spark Innovation Challenge announced last week.
Cheticamp’s Aucoin said he and his partners, Stéphane Sogne and Joel Lefort, have always been involved in community development and about two years ago started thinking about ways to harness one of the area’s natural resources — wind — and apply it in a way to assist local fishermen.
“As you know there’s a lot of wind in Cheticamp and we’ve always been talking about renewable energy here, windmills, et cetera, but of course you have to find a way to use it,” Aucoin said in an interview, adding they know many fishermen and know that shipbuilders are having difficulty meeting new diesel engine requirements.
“We thought we could propose a solution and get a product out there.”
The result is Hydrotroniks, their concept for a carbonneutral boat engine. They will use the $25,000 they received from the Spark Cape Breton competition to try to leverage additional funds and build a prototype they can hopefully have ready to go in the water sometime during the next fishing season.
Aucoin said they had to carefully research to see what would be required by a fishing boat.
“I’m talking about electric batteries and engines and all of this,” he said.
They then had to go through the financials and build a business case. While, in a sense,
prototypes exist if you look at electric cars, Aucoin said the technology hasn’t yet been tweaked to apply to fishing boats on the ocean.
Local fishermen have shown interest in helping with the
testing and performing sea trials, Aucoin added.
“If ever the technology was viable, it would make sense for them,” he said. “They might be saving money on fuel, which is one of their largest costs, they would have a very quiet fishing boat and they could be contributing positively to their own environment.”
They’re interested in helping to modernize the fishery, Aucoin added.
“We think the more people like us that work on projects like this, the better chances we have of maintaining a viable fishery here in Atlantic Canada,” he said.
Talem Health Analytics will receive $50,000 in funding from the competition. Co-founders, Paul Travis and Matthew Kay, are developing software to help physiotherapists and orthopedic specialists track, analyze and predict treatment regimens.
As physiotherapists in private practice, Travis said they found there was a lack of standardization in data collection
and how to use data to provide insight on patient outcomes and treatment plans.
“We developed an idea to create a platform using machine learning technologies and implement data from physiotherapy assessments, to be able to predict healing rates and treatment time frame and duration,” Travis said.
They embarked on a project with the National Research Council and through that developed a prototype with a local developer.
“We confirmed out hypothesis that if we collect this data we can predict, using certain algorithms, treatment time frames,” Travis said. “We continue to work and develop a good data collection process and scale this prototype to commercialization that we can use in clinics an be able to predict expenditures as well in private sector insurance.”
Travis said he hopes that may be achieved within the next six to nine months.