Hamilton tech takes on COVID-19: Round 2
In this week’s roundup of the Hamilton tech community vs. the novel coronavirus, we’ve got open data, scrappy startups, VR for teleconferencing (finally!), and public computers teaming up to form a supercomputer (is that how that works?).
Steve Way, Professor and Coordinator for the Analytics for Business Decision Making Program at Mohawk College, spoke with Matt Holmes at CKTB’s Newstalk 1010 on how open data could be used to help people stay health in order to get back to work sooner.
McMaster startup Longan Vision has repurposed tech originally designed to help firefighters and developed a scanning device to measure temperature, which it will be piloting at Nations Fresh Foods grocery store in downtown Hamilton to detect customers whose temperatures are greater than 37 degrees Celsius.
Hamilton-based VoxNeuro has also pivoted to address the pandemic, in this case using its Cognitive Health Assessments™ (CHAs) to help researchers identify the effects of the coronavirus – which has been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier – on the patient’s brain.
The Innovation Factory has chosen the virtual reality company VirBELA to provide an interactive virtual office environment where staff, clients and industry partners can come together to meet, network and work together like never before — no matter where they are.
The McMaster library is donating the computing power of 115 of its computers to Folding@home, a “supercomputing project that’s using processing power donated by individuals and organizations to perform complex calculations that could provide researchers with new insights into the novel coronavirus,” according to reporting done by Erica Balch for the Daily News at McMaster.
Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash