The Bless Your Sole Design Team has created an exoskeleton around the ankle joint targeting patients who have suffered an Incomplete Spinal Cord Injury. These patients have lost some motor control making it difficult to walk. The exoskeleton uses passive support structures and active actuation devices to assist the user complete their gait cycle. With repeated use, this facilitates rehabilitation through neural plasticity with the goal that the user regains some amount of motor control of the ankle joint.

Faculty Advisor: Arash Arami

New parents often suffer from sleep deprivation because of their baby’s unregulated sleep schedule. For this project, a device was designed to assist new parents by helping soothe their baby back to sleep during night wakings. Using multiple sensors, the device captures the heart rate, movement, and sound of a baby and outputs white noise and light in response to changes in sleep state. These stimuli have been shown to induce sleep in newborns.

Faculty Advisor: Ehsan Hashemi

Cupcake decorating is a labour-intensive process that requires lots of time, skill, and practice, and creates a lot of food waste. The SugarBot is an attachment that integrates with an existing 3D printer, to print intricate icing designs directly onto cupcakes. The module mixes and dispenses precise quantities of icing, colouring, and flavouring, in 8 different combinations. This allows for a variety across a batch of cupcakes, while minimizing waste. The SugarBot is perfect for small bakeries, restaurants, and home chefs looking to take their food art to the next level.

Faculty Advisor: Mihaela Vlasea

Surgeries are personnel-intensive procedures that have been exceedingly burdened by the Covid-19 crisis. A Helping Hand – The Surgical Assistant aims to make surgeries more efficient by automating tool delivery from the sterile tray to the surgeon within the operating room, freeing up the scrub nurse (who would normally deliver tools) to complete more complex tasks. An AI-powered robotic system detects and identifies tools on a tray, picks them up with a modular sterilizable gripper, and delivers them to the surgeon safely and accurately.

Faculty Advisor: Stewart McLachlin

Technical Advisor : Brandon DeHart

Wood is an excellent fuel for heating a home, particularly in rural areas where it is cheap and plentiful. However, existing wood-fueled home heating systems must be tended to many times per day, which makes them impractical and limits their use. We have addressed this issue by developing AutoStoke, a device that holds a stockpile of firewood and automatically loads it into the firebox of a wood furnace when necessary, enabling continuous operation for 7 days or longer without intervention by the user.

Faculty Advisor: Peter Teertstra

Brewing a cup of pour-over coffee is a laborious process which relies on a skilled barista and a tuned recipe that requires the methodical pouring of water over the coffee bed. Meeting growing market demands becomes challenging for cafés as their brewing capacity needs to increase. The Caffiends system focuses on automating and improving the water distribution over the coffee bed to produce consistent cups of coffee such that pour-overs can be automated in high-end cafés while reducing the barista’s attention needed for each cup.

Faculty Advisor: Christine Moresoli