The idea of sticking their parents in a nursing home weighs heavily on many Baby Boomers. Martin Spencer has a solution: robots.

“Many people quit good-paying jobs to keep their beloved mother or father out of the horrors of a nursing home,” says Spencer, who created the CareBot, a 4-foot, 100-pound, robot with a screen for a face and wheels for legs that reminds owners to take their medication.

If necessary, the CareBot calls emergency contacts and dials 911 and is fitted with a webcam to allow purchasers the ability to monitor and have video chats with their elderly relatives from anywhere.

Spencer says the CareBot should be available next fall for between $12,000 and $15,000 – a price point he says should alleviate pressure on family budgets by paring down the “hidden costs” of the aging crisis.

“They won’t accept isolation,” says University of Toronto Professor Mark Chignell (MIE) of the Baby Boomer generation. Professor Chignell studies how humans interact with technology. CareBot’s video-chatting function may help to overcome social isolation, a common problem among seniors, he says.

Follow the link to read the full article on the Reuters website.

The Wall Street Journal’s 2010 Technology Innovation Awards have chosen InVisage’s QuantumFilm as the winner in the Semiconductor category.

The winning product makes vast improvements in capturing light for digital cameras, and especially cell phone cameras. Using semiconductor quantum dots instead of weakly light-absorbing silicon, QuantumFilm image sensors capture more than 90% of available light instead of the 25% in silicon-based sensors.

Professor Ted Sargent, of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, is the founder and Chief Technology Officer for InVisage Technologies Inc. Founded in 2006, the company is based in California, but leverages research and technology from U of T.

“The WSJ award is great news for InVisage. It acknowledges the disruptive innovation this company brings to the image sensor market,” says Professor Sargent, who also holds the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology.

“This award also speaks to the vision and leadership of the individuals at U of T who enabled the highly successful transfer of technology to this dynamic start-up.”

InVisage will have the product available in consumer products as early as the end of next year.

“This is an immense accomplishment for Ted Sargent and InVisage, and we congratulate him and his team. The award reaffirms the exceptional quality of research and technology innovation that comes out of University of Toronto Engineering and its spin-off companies,” says Cristina Amon, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

U of T Engineering has been at the leading edge of entrepreneurship in Canada since 1951, with the establishment of more than 100 successful spin-off companies.

To see the full list of winners of  The Wall Street Journal’s 2010 Technology Innovation Awards, click here. 

University Professor Emeritus Ted Davison, of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was inducted into the USA’s National Academy of Engineering (NAE) as a Foreign Associate in a ceremony in Washington, DC, on October 3rd. Founded in 1964, the NAE provides engineering leadership in service to the United States and globally. Members and Foreign Associates of the NAE rank among the world’s most accomplished engineers.

Professor Davison is one of only nine Foreign Associates to be inducted this year, and the only Canadian elected since 2007. He is the third U of T professor to be inducted into the NAE, along with Professor Cristina Amon and Professor Emeritus W. Murray Wonham.

Professor Davison is a pioneer and world-leader in the area of control systems design theory, particularly the control of large scale systems. These occur frequently throughout society, in power systems, aerospace systems, transportation systems, network routing systems, building temperature control systems, pulp and paper control systems, and areas such as in management science and biological systems.

Professor Davison’s design approaches have been adopted worldwide and applied in areas such as traffic-light control, computer network routing control, chemical process control and electrical power system network problems. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and has received the Killam Prize in Engineering as well as Killam and Steacie Fellowships.

The University of Toronto has the top engineering program in Canada, according to the UK-based Times Higher Education (THE) rankings. Ranked 13th among global universities, U of T is one of only two Canadian institutions to make the top 50 list of engineering and technology programs. The University of British Columbia ranked 38th.

“It is rewarding that U of T Engineering has once again been recognized as one of the very best in the world,” said Cristina Amon, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “This is a great accomplishment for the University of Toronto, and for Canada. U of T graduates make up about 10 per cent of engineers in Canada.”

This year, not only did the Times Higher Education rankings partner with Thomson-Reuters, it also overhauled its methodology. The new approach takes into account teaching, in addition to research, reputation and citations. Times Higher Education also doubled its performance indicators.

U of T Engineering continues to lead all Canadian universities in all international rankings. Engineering at U of T recently placed 19th in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and eighth in the world in the 2010 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

In addition to placing strong in engineering and technology, U of T was also ranked first in Canada and 17th overall this year by Times Higher Education.

 

Future storage, computing and sensing technologies will invariably rely on an ability to measure ever smaller amounts of charge at the fastest possible speeds. To date, state-of-the art single electron transistors have held the record, but required cooling to extremely low temperatures (i.e., some 270 degrees C below room temperature).

The Harry Ruda group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering was able to demonstrate recently the use of nanowire transistors to give comparable performance at temperatures close to room temperature, exceeding the performance of alternative approaches that work at close to room temperature (e.g., nanomechanical systems and conventional field effect transistors) by several orders of magnitude.

The nanowire transistors are so sensitive that they may be turned from conducting to insulating devices as a result of a single electron, with sensitivity down to about a hundred thousandth of one electron charge when measured at a frequency of one hertz. With optimization, the authors are optimistic that these devices can likely yield a further order of magnitude improvement in performance. Numerous practical applications of this new technology are envisaged, as is providing an exciting new tool to probing physical phenomena.

The results of the research were published September 19th on nature.com; follow the link to read the scientific paper.

A group of business people and academics has started counting Canadian “acts of innovation” in the hopes that it will motivate creativity and change among businesses across the country.

So far about 40 companies and government departments are involved in the partnership with the University of Toronto that is intended to bring engineering expertise to businesses such as Canadian Tire, Loblaws, Tridel or institutions such as hospitals.

The partnership involves a mandatory two-semester course for fourth-year Engineering students, where they solve problems for industrial clients such as how to optimize their supply chain or the placement of nurses and doctors in an emergency room for maximum efficiency, says Professor Jean Zu, Chair of the University of Toronto’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department.

The students are not paid and take four other courses at the same time. They are co-supervised by a business mentor and an academic mentor from the university.

Professor Zu says the program would help the younger generation become “business-innovation oriented.”

When asked if any concerns had been expressed about the level of corporate involvement in the course, Professor Zu says the program had received nothing but encouragement to date.

The group is currently in discussions about intellectual property issues that could arise when innovation is generated through research that both the businesses and universities want to claim.

Follow the link to read the full article on the CBC News website.