Grants and Contributions

This project will test hypotheses and experiment with new mechanisms to design (or optimize) a repeatable and scalable business process, which may result in new business methods for electronic health records or new digital health products.

This project focuses on creating an advanced automated retinal image analysis platform for Canada’s healthcare system. Using cutting-edge deep learning techniques and multimodal large language models, the platform will analyze 3D OCT scans to detect retinal diseases and conditions. By incorporating a robust human-in-the-loop validation process, the system ensures highly accurate and reliable insights for clinicians. This innovation aims to reduce diagnostic delays, improve patient outcomes, and enhance the efficiency of retinal disease management in clinical practice.

OKAKI is currently working with several clinical research laboratories to achieve Health Canada and FDA regulatory approval for Gaitly, a computer vision and NLP driven software-as-a-medical-device application. The project requires a graduate with skills related to computer vision, natural language processing, digital signals processing, and machine learning to assist the project manager and research laboratories to develop new and refine existing algorithms for measuring Gait, Balance, and Cognitive assessments. The expected outcomes for this project includes the development and publication of novel computer vision and NLP algorithms used for achieving regulatory approval and technical reports for use in patents and publications.

OKAKI is developing a healthcare product - Gaitly - to use mobile device cameras and state of the art deep learning (vision/NLP) to administer gait, balance and cognitive assessments. These types of assessments are important to assess risk and monitor treatment/disease progression in many common conditions (e.g., falls, concussions, Parkinson's). Gaitly will disrupt the market, and become a new standard of practice, as it will enable any healthcare provider or consumer to administer, track and share more accurate and objective, evidence-based, normative assessments. All competing products today require trained professionals, specialized equipment or wearables, or use only the motion sensors on mobile devices (vsGaitly's use of cameras).

Funding will support research and development to identify solutions to National Defence’s Rapid Response: Real-time Insights for Pandemic Decision Making Challenge.
Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) in collaboration with Canada’s defence, security and public safety communities is looking for innovative epidemiological and healthcare solutions involving data gathering and data analytics technologies to support the early detection and community-based surveillance of outbreaks of contagious diseases. The goal is to provide actionable insights and to permit rapid decision-making with respect to the full emergency preparedness spectrum.

Develop and test a machine learning model to predict the 30-day risk of hospitalization, emergency department visit (ED), or death after a person in Alberta receives an opioid or benzodiazepine prescription and develop/validate an end-to-end platform to simulate the use of this ML model as part of Alberta's prescription monitoring program for controlled drugs (Alberta TPP).

OKAKI is a public health services and health technology social enterprise. has partnered with a number of organizations to deliver COVID19 Immunization services, in a trusted setting, to vulnerable, hard to reach populations with significant barriers to accessing mainstream services and/or a history of systemic racism in the healthcare system. Services are delivered through established clinics and mobile outreach. Populations include Indigenous peoples, vulnerable newcomers (including sponsored refugees and refugee claimants), undocumented individuals, migrant workers and those at risk of homelessness. Partners include Siksika Nation, Aboriginal Friendship Centre of Calgary, Metis Nation of AB Region 3, CCIS, Calgary Homeless Foundation.

Funding will support research and development to identify solutions to National Defence’s Rapid Response: Real-time Insights for Pandemic Decision Making Challenge.
Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) in collaboration with Canada’s defence, security and public safety communities is looking for innovative epidemiological and healthcare solutions involving data gathering and data analytics technologies to support the early detection and community-based surveillance of outbreaks of contagious diseases. The goal is to provide actionable insights and to permit rapid decision-making with respect to the full emergency preparedness spectrum.

OKAKI is the developer of immunization software used by public health, pharmacy, occupational and other community immunizers. OKAKI is urgently enhancing its software products to improve the safety of mass immunization programs in the context of COVID19, in accordance with national guidelines. Features are being implemented to improve the speed and efficiency of services, reducing face time and contact with commonly touched surfaces. This project aims to develop an automated speech recognition system for immunization workflow, for hands free services. The models would need to be deployed on local desktops and mobile devices, work off-line, and provide real-time speech to text conversion, while preserving health information privacy.

To be apart of a team to implement DevOps into the organization. A majority of the time will be spent testing business functionallity in a variety of applications and experimenting with different testing tools to automate UI testing for in three different platforms (WPF, HTML5, mobile).