Your next workout may be smarter, thanks to college research

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Research dollars are increasingly flowing to fuel the industry-related work done at colleges, including helping a company with a workout-tracking device develop a mobile app for it.

As colleges pick up millions more in research dollars compared with previous years, they are proving their mettle as applied innovators.

The top 50 research colleges drew $152.8-million in total research income for the 2013 fiscal year, according to Research Infosource Inc.. This was an increase of nearly 31 per cent over the previous year, which was itself was up 30.7 per cent from 2011.

The reasons for the surge range from more government funding to the greater emphasis that colleges place on practical, industry-related research.

"We have a growing phenomenon here and it's still very early days for college research," says Ron Freedman, chief executive officer of Research Infosource, a research and consultancy on Canadian R&D. "Universities have been in the research business for 500 years; colleges, as a dedicated activity, only recently got involved in research in a serious way."

While universities place a greater emphasis on what he calls "curiosity-oriented research," colleges focus on the customer-oriented variety. Nearly all of their research requires a local partner or end user before the work even starts.

The British Columbia Institute of Technology in Greater Vancouver led the way in Research Infosource's rankings, posting $15.2-million for the last fiscal year in research income, a 193-per-cent increase from 2012. Bolstered with a provincial mandate to help boost the area's economic development by helping local industries, BCIT has emphasized research themes such as sustainability, energy resource manufacturing, transportation, information and communications technology, and health and agriculture.

"We work with companies across the range, from the mom-and-pop, one- and two-person companies all the way up to major international companies," says Kim Dotto, BCIT's dean of applied research. Among the larger ones are BC Hydro, Siemens Electric Ltd. and Panasonic Corp.

"A lot of the funding that brought us up to the $15-million was through some of the bigger projects that we have been working on with larger international companies."

BCIT aligns itself with the province's major industry sectors.

"If you look at our research, we have Canada Research chairs in building science, we have Canada Research chairs in phyto analytics, which is in natural health and food products, working with the agriculture industry … we have one in rehabilitation engineering," Dr. Dotto says.

BCIT, with an enrolment of more than 47,000 students, has also recently undertaken entrepreneurial-driven projects, such as helping a local skateboard manufacturer, Rayne Longboards, develop a way to test its products for flexural strength. It is also helping another company attach pedometry technology to hockey skates to measure stride length and gait, among other things.

"That's one of the areas that we're moving into: quasi-medical or more of the sports medicine, sports performance kind of area," Dr. Dotto says.

While BCIT helps local industries prepare products for commercialization, that is where its assistance ends.

"Our mandate is to help industry, not so much to generate profits or royalties for BCIT," Dr. Dotto says.

Rounding out the Top 3 colleges for funded research are Northern Alberta Institute of Technology ($9.7-million) and George Brown College ($9.3-million).

Research Infosource also ranks industry partnerships.

Workouts made smarter

Algonquin College in Ottawa topped the list in both number of partnerships (120) and completed projects, with 180 in the 2013 fiscal year.

"Through being involved in this type of research, we really help students improve their preparedness for the workplace because they're working on a real-life project with industry partners," says Mark Hoddenbagh, the acting executive director for partnerships and applied research at Algonquin.

"It's part of our strategy to get as many people involved in applied research as possible," Dr. Hoddenbagh says. "We have a heavy, heavy focus on what we call in-class projects or capstone projects, projects that students do as part of the curriculum."

The school hires about 20 per cent of its students for its research work. Last summer, 85 students were paid to work on projects funded by various government sources and clients.

One of those projects involved working on a local business called GymTrack, which uses sensors to form a statistical database of the work a person does in the gym, from repetitions to weight to the time it takes to lift and lower a dumbbell. The company pitched Algonquin through Pitch Fork, the college's Dragons' Den-like intake process, and was taken on board and provided with funding.

"It's like a virtual gym trainer," Dr. Hoddenbagh says. "We were working on helping them develop a mobile app to transfer data from your wristband to your phone."

Although Algonquin is still helping Gym Track – one of between 75 and 100 projects that the college has on the go – Dr. Hoddenbagh says the company has hired the two students who worked for it last summer.

It's that kind of transition that he hopes he can provide for all 6,000 graduating students annually before they graduate.

"I think what we're really lacking in Canada is the translation of knowledge into commercial products," he says. "That's really where the colleges play a great role."

Gone to the dogs

The British Columbia Institute of Technology doesn't just work with local businesses to help them improve their products. The college recently co-operated with the Vancouver Police Department's canine unit to build a new obstacle training course for its dogs.

Using gait analysis and motion capture analysis on the dogs, researchers from BCIT used the information to build facilities that will train the animals without overstressing them, but still allow them to experience the kind of real-life situations they will have in their day-to-day activities.

"You often see these dogs try to leap over fences and run through walls and various other stuff, [which is] not actually a good thing for a lot of dogs to do," says Kim Dotto, dean of applied research. "There are stresses that will damage them long-term if they do it, so a lot of the physiology of the dogs has been incorporated into the training facilities."

The result is a facility that will be an integral part of training for the dogs of the Vancouver Police Department and other units trained by the VPD, such as the Port Moody and West Vancouver Police Departments.