Institutional Strategic Initiative

Teams of undergraduate and graduate students grappled with problems that ranged from altering irrigation practices in Sudan to adapting snow-clearing plans in Ottawa

In the wake of Toronto’s warmest winter on record, students at the University of Toronto recently gathered for the inaugural U of T Climate Impacts Hackathon.

The event asked students to tackle several challenges brought by a warming planet: How should the City of Ottawa adapt its snow clearing plan in response to increased precipitation caused by our warming atmosphere? How should irrigation practices in Sudan change in response to higher temperatures and reduced rainfall? And where should new cooling stations – swimming pools, libraries, community centres, shopping malls – be located in an increasingly sweltering City of Toronto?

Participants included undergraduate and graduate students from a range of natural science and engineering disciplines, as well as from the humanities and social sciences. They were divided into teams and competed for prizes.

The hackathon was led by Paul Kushner, a professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary physics in the department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science; and Karen Smith, an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of physical and environmental sciences (DPES) at U of T Scarborough. Co-organizers included Michael Morris, a PhD candidate in the department of physics, and Francisco Camacho, a masters of environmental science student at DPES.

The event was hosted by the department of physics and the DPES; sponsors included Climate Positive Energy (CPE) – a U of T institutional strategic initiative – the Centre for Climate Science and Engineering (CSE) and the Cosmic Future Initiative.

The event kicked off with a wide-ranging discussion from a panel of climate experts with diverse perspectives.

Steve Easterbrook, director of the School of the Environment in the Faculty of Arts & Science, spoke about how climate models work and why we can trust them. Lisa MacTavish, project lead in resilience, climate resilience policy and research for the City of Toronto, shared how the city uses climate projections to manage infrastructure and crisis planning. And Daniel Posen, an associate professor in the department of civil and mineral engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, talked about his expertise at the intersection of climate change and engineering.

To develop their solutions, students used the University of Toronto Climate Downscaling Workflow (UTCDW) which includes the UTCDW Guidebook developed by Morris, Smith and Kushner, and the UTCDW Survey, a project design tool. The UTCDW was developed with the support of the CSE, CPE and the Data Sciences Institute, another U of T institutional strategic initiative.

Climate models or simulations typically work on a global scale; the UTCDW is designed to help researchers “downscale” what the models do in order to understand how smaller regions and even individual cities are being affected by climate change. The resulting projections can then inform decisions on a local level.

“In our proposal for support to develop these tools, we committed to holding this hackathon to roll them out,” says Kushner. “The intent is to encourage a better understanding of climate change impacts on different domains of application in an atmosphere of fun engagement and community cohort building.”

First prize was awarded to a team that tackled the cooling centre challenge. Using the downscaling tool, the team made detailed projections using temperature and humidity data. They considered vulnerable groups including children, the elderly, refugees and the underhoused; and they factored in education and income levels.

After surveying the current locations of the city’s cooling centres, the team came up with recommendations for six new centres located in areas that are currently underserved.

“We were very pleased and impressed at how far the student participants got in their analysis – how they creatively overcame technical and conceptual obstacles, and how they maintained a constructive and positive attitude as they grappled with the serious issues of climate change,” Kushner says.

U of T sociologist explores perceptions of street safety in urban and rural communities

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 16:21:05 +0000

U of T sociologist explores perceptions of street safety in urban and rural communities

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 01/12/2024 - 11:21

Cutline

(photo by Daniel Tadevosyan/Shutterstock)

Tina Adamopoulos

Topic

Our Community

Black Research Network

Institutional Strategic Initiative

Sociology

U of T Mississauga

Subheadline

With a focus on the Halifax area, Timothy Bryan says his research challenges the notion that cities are dangerous while rural spaces are peaceful and quiet

Crime is often perceived as an urban phenomenon whereas rural life is viewed as more bucolic – but Timothy Bryan is putting these ideas to the test.

An assistant professor in the department of sociology at University of Toronto Mississauga, Bryan analyzes how urban and rural residents perceive and imagine street safety.

“Often, criminological research has assumed certain things about crime. Crime is often perceived as something that happens in urban areas,” says Bryan, whose research revolves around the policing of hate crime and criminal justice reform in Canada.

“What this project wants to do is to disrupt some of those binaries that assume that urban spaces are always spaces of danger and that rural spaces are somehow these peaceful, quiet spaces.”

He is currently focused on the Halifax area, where two recent events have largely shaped the view of public safety. The first is the April 2020 mass shooting that left 22 people dead in rural Nova Scotia, sparking an inquiry into the RCMP’s efforts to keep residents safe.

The other event was increased scrutiny of street checks that disproportionally targeted African Nova Scotian residents. A March 2019 study by Scot Wortley, a professor at U of T’s Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, showed that Black residents were six times more likely to be street checked in the Halifax area compared to white residents.

Bryan travelled to Halifax last year to interview residents about their feelings on street safety and policing. He was supported by an IGNITE grant from the Black Research Network, a U of T institutional strategic initiative.

“On the back of these two events, what I found was that many residents were rethinking their relationship with police,” Bryan says, adding many had previously reported a positive relationship with police or had no negative relationships with police.

“But recent events actually started to have residents think differently about whether police were capable of keeping them safe, whether police wanted to keep them safe, or whether the presence of police was even a sign of safety.”

The Wortley report ultimately made 53 recommendations focused on street checks, data collection and police-community relations. In October 2019, street checks were permanently banned in Nova Scotia.

Another element of Bryan’s project will use a combination of participant-produced drawings of street scenes and interviews to address questions about street safety and how police contribute to these perceptions.

He says the exercise not only helps him gain a deeper understanding of the perceptions of urban and rural spaces, it also asks participants to explain what they would change to make their neighbourhoods safer.

“I’m hoping that the images not only provide a method of getting at the data and people’s responses,” he says, “but become a kind of artifact in themselves as a kind of snapshot of how it is that people are coming to understand where they live, how they live and perhaps what they want changed about the areas within it.”

He is currently completing about 40 interviews with participants in Halifax and developing those responses into an academic publication. He hopes to present preliminary findings at research conferences.

Earbuds to monitor blood pressure? Researcher says they could outperform smartwatches

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 17:44:30 +0000

Earbuds to monitor blood pressure? Researcher says they could outperform smartwatches

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 03/16/2023 - 13:44

Cutline

Ken Christofferson, a doctoral trainee under U of T Assistant Professor Alex Mariakakis's co-supervision, collects physiological data from earbuds for blood pressure monitoring (photo courtesy of TRANSFORM HF)

Augusta Lipscombe

Topic

Our Community

Institutional Strategic Initiative

Computer Science

Faculty of Arts & Science

Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research

When it comes to blood pressure monitoring, Alex Mariakakis and his team are all ears.

Alex Mariakakis

Mariakakis, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, has been awarded a seed grant by TRANSFORM HF – a U of T institutional strategic initiative that develops point-of-care diagnostics, wearables and AI technologies to monitor and proactively treat people with heart failure – for his project “Accessible Blood Pressure Estimation with Earbuds.”

As a ubiquitous computing researcher, Mariakakis’s work leverages pervasive technologies (smartphones, wearables, even Wi-Fi) for use in human-centred applications.

We sat down with Mariakakis to learn more about how earbuds could be used to monitor blood pressure and how he is revolutionizing digital health for heart failure care.

Can you describe your earbuds project?

At our core, we’re interested in trying to make blood pressure assessment more accessible to everyone.

Blood pressure cuffs are the gold standard for blood pressure assessment, but they can only be used on occasion: Someone has to sit down, put the cuff on their arm, and remain still to complete the measurement. This process can be cumbersome and people might not wear the cuff properly or follow the official protocol for measurement. And, of course, people must own blood pressure cuffs for self-monitoring at home.

We’re interested in leveraging existing technology – earbuds – to remove the cost of a blood pressure cuff and increase the ease of at-home blood pressure measurement. Our moonshot is to facilitate regular assessment of blood pressure and support self-management of heart failure.

Many earbuds have noise-cancelling technology, which relies on having an outer microphone and an in-ear microphone. The outer microphone listens for ambient sound while the in-ear microphone listens to what’s happening inside the ear. It turns out that the in-ear microphone is able to pick up on some very interesting sounds inside the body, including heart sounds. Research has shown that you can use the audio recorded from inside the body to measure heart rate, but you’re really able to get the same sounds you would hear from a stethoscope. We’re hoping that we can analyze these heart sounds using different signal processing techniques to infer someone’s blood pressure.

An earbud prototype that has been wired for data collection (photo courtesy of TRANSFORM HF)

How would a person with heart failure use this technology?

The nice thing about using earbuds for blood pressure monitoring is that people wouldn’t need to do anything differently. The idea is that you would just wear the earbuds and the in-ear microphone would collect audio and transmit it to your smartphone using Bluetooth – and the phone would analyze the heart sounds to determine your blood pressure. That information could be shown to you or it could be delivered to your care team.

Any earbud that has an in-ear microphone will be able to utilize this technology. So as long as patients already have active noise-cancelling earbuds, the technology will work!

Because earbuds can be used in noisy places and heart sounds can be very subtle, a quiet environment is going to be key for effective use. So, the most practical use case for this technology would be a telehealth consultation when people are often seated inside their homes.

How do earbuds differ from other sensing technologies?

More and more, we see smartwatches coming out with the ability to provide health metrics like heart rate, blood oxygenation, sleep scores and stress metrics. Why not earbuds? I think earbuds can do a lot of the same things – and in some cases better.

For example, a lot of the smartwatch-based systems for estimating blood pressure rely on looking at blood flow at a single site. The advantage of earbuds is that you get two locations – the left ear and the right ear — which can give us twice the amount of information. Some researchers have also found that we can measure blood pressure based on how long it takes for a heart pulse to go from one location of the body to the other. You can do this kind of estimation with a smartwatch, but the distance between points does not give a lot of room for error. With earbuds, you get a much larger distance. That’s one of the exciting opportunities where we think that we can actually outperform smartwatches.

Through this project, TRANSFORM HF is welcoming a new partner into its network: Tsinghua University. What role they will it play?

I’ve known Yuntao Wang (assistant professor, Tsinghua University and project coinvestigator) for a few years. When I was in Seattle, he was a visiting researcher and we collaborated on multiple projects. He’s a really great guy and it just so happens that he has also been doing research with earbuds. For example, in one project, he created a lightweight algorithm for detecting coughs from the audio recorded by earbuds.

Beyond bringing his technical expertise, Yuntao will also help us to generate a more diverse data set. We are hoping to do some data collection in China, which will be really helpful for ensuring that we have a diverse cohort. It will allow us to check that our algorithms apply to different populations, making us more confident in whatever we develop.

What are the next steps after this seed grant?

We’re very interested in monitoring blood pressure through any ubiquitous sensing mechanism. One study we’re hoping to do alongside this project, or maybe a little later, would be to compare and contrast all the different technologies being considered for blood pressure monitoring – earbuds, smartwatches, smartphones – to see what works best. Can we get better performance with earbuds versus a smartwatch? Can we combine a smartwatch and earbuds to get an even more accurate measurement?

Eventually, we want to deploy this in clinic. This will help us to answer all sorts of questions related to how we would integrate this kind of technology into health care: What benefits are there to measuring blood pressure multiple times a day for patients and clinicians? Is showing the data enough, or do we need to help people put that data into context? We also want to deploy our technology to those who are underserved. I am hoping that the TRANSFORM HF seed grant will help us initiate engagement with different groups, including Indigenous communities.