Isaac Chang and his team are developing a digital health technology called Smart Tile that can monitor a patient’s heart function while they sleep and alert clinicians, caregivers, and patients of any adverse events. Innovations like this are key for empowering people living with heart failure to manage their own care and stay out of hospital.
Watch four teams from our inaugural 2023 ECHO Discovery cohort pitch their novel innovative cardiovascular health solutions to judges Craig Simmons, Darshan Brahmbhatt, Julie Vizza, and Sumaiyah Rehman for a chance to win $500!
While the judges deliberate, hear from global leader in digital health technology, Jacqueline Shreibati. Dr. Shreibati discusses how she pivoted her trajectory and leveraged her diverse skillset to make real-world impact – inspirational words on the importance of finding your value, being persistent, and navigating rejection!
Drumroll please… Panorama Health (Kathryn Howe, Tenzin Yangzom, Sophie Sigfstead, Ruilin Wu, Nathan Holwell) was awarded $500 for a conversational AI app for smoking cessation! Congrats to Cardio Fi (Anat Usatinsky, Samantha Unger, John Darwin Namata, Vaswani Kumar Lukka, Tina Sokhanvar), Podiascale (Mohammed Rashidul Anwar, Rayhaan Bassawon, Jonathun Wu), and PressurePal (Daniel Davoudpour, Elizabeth Karvasarki, Amanda Mac, Megh Rathod) on their strong pitches as well.
Our Collaboration Starter Grants support members of our community working together by funding the initial activities of collaborative projects that align with the TRANSFORM HF mission. We are pleased to announce the recipients of our 2023 Collaboration Starter Grants.
Breaking news: TRANSFORM HF has been awarded a $1.65 million 6-year NSERC Collaborative Research and Training Experience grant to train the next generation of digital health innovators to design for equity!
Translating Cardiovascular Remote Diagnostic and Monitoring Technologies for Equitable Healthcare, or CaRDM Eq, will be delivered by a multidisciplinary team led by Dr. Azadeh Yadollahi.
Together with this diverse team and 30+ collaborators, we will ensure the next innovations in digital health have equity at their core – from ideation, to design, to implementation.
In December 2022, Dr. Heather Ross and Dr. Joseph Cafazzo were named University Health Network’s Inventors of the Year in recognition of their development and commercialization of Medly– a remote heart failure care tool powered by software and AI. As part of #ECHODiscovery’s Fireside Chat speaker series, Heather and Joe joined us to talk all things Medly – from what’s required for a successful collaboration to what’s in store for the future of Medly Therapeutics as it spreads, scales, and integrates new features.
When it comes to digital innovation, Alex Mariakakis and his team are all ears! Meet our 2023 Seed Grant recipient, who’s aiming to make blood pressure monitoring more accessible using earbuds.
Earbuds have the potential to remove the cost of blood pressure cuffs, increase the ease of at-home monitoring, and could even out-perform smartwatches! Alex views earbuds as one of the next big platforms – not just for blood pressure monitoring, but for digital health in general.
By supporting members of the TRANSFORM HF community in the development of new projects, our Collaboration Starter Grants aim to advance our mission of digital innovation for equitable heart failure care.
Another key objective of these grants is to foster new research partnerships and expand our network – something Dr. Jay Shaw has been able to do on a national scale through his pan-Canadian policy analysis of virtual care technologies.
We are pleased to announce that both TRANSFORM HF’s applicants to the 2022 CIHR Health Systems Impact Fellows (HSI) competition, Sarah Lawrason and Samuel Petrie, were successful!
Learning about entrepreneurship is an ongoing process that should start with a program like ECHO Discovery.
Together, the Translational Biology & Engineering Program and TRANSFORM HF designed ECHO Discovery to introduce trainees to the world of ideation, research translation, and entrepreneurship.
ECHO Discovery provides an advantage to trainees who choose to pursue either a start-up or career in industry, health care, or government.
TRANSFORM HF members had the opportunity to participate in the On the Land Indigenous Education Program led by Dr. Angela Mashford-Pringle In May 2022.
Participants explored culturally-safe, strengths-based, and healing-informed clinical and research practices through hands-on, land-based learning.
TRANSFORM HF is very grateful to Dr. Angela Mashford-Pringle, her team, and the Elders and Cultural Knowledge Keepers and Helpers who made On the Land such an impactful experience.
