ADVANCING OUR HEALTH CARE

prescribe PrEP, while the company’s Frida service offers patients an online ADHD assessment for a $599 fee and, if diagnosed, ongoing care for $29 a month. Freddie is available in all provinces outside Atlantic Canada, while Frida is available in Alberta, B.C. and Ontario.

“We believe that using smart technology and the best clinicians will enable us to deliver a better health-care experience and ultimately better health-care outcomes,” says co-founder and COO Pete MacLeod.

H Eadversity

In 2019, newly minted Top 40 Ryan Todd, told Avenue that he hoped that his new startup could eventually impact one million people — a goal he called “arbitrary, audacious and maybe a bit foolish.” Turns out, it wasn’t foolish at all. Today, Headversity provides support for more than one million people in 22 countries.

Todd, a psychiatrist, launched Headversity for companies that wanted to improve the resilience and mental well being of their employees. The idea grew from his experience treating workers in Alberta who did not have access to mental health tools that could improve focus and mindfulness, and reduce depression, substance use and workplace accidents. “We were hell-bent on helping the people who needed it most,” says Todd. Now, it seems, they’re hell-bent on expansion: Headversity’s client base grew by 250 per cent in 2021, while last year the company secured $12.5 million in Series A financing to expand into the United States, acquiring Health Improvement Solutions for an undisclosed amount.

L Umiio

Advancements come slowly with rare diseases, one reason being that there are too few patients in any one place for researchers to gather enough data about rare conditions. That’s where Lumiio comes in. The locally founded digital health company specializes in building patient registries and collecting real-world data from around the globe. The data is then used by researchers, pharmaceutical companies and patient organizations to accelerate understanding of rare diseases.

Lumiio is the result of a project started 15 years ago by Dr. Lawrence Korngut, a neurologist at the University of Calgary. He partnered with doctors, clinicians and researchers across the country to form the Canadian Neuromuscular Disease Registry and collect patient data for more than 150 diseases. The effort was so successful that Korngut and his colleagues began getting requests for their expertise for other patient registries. They launched Lumiio to help patients suffering from all kinds of rare diseases around the world.

Today, the company has seven full-time employees and operates in 18 countries. It recently expanded into wearable integration — using data from things like smart watches — and overlaps this information with clinical and patient-reported data. CEO Blaine Penny’s son was born with a rare mitochondrial disease that went undiagnosed. It contributed to a brain injury that left him unable to walk and talk. Penny says he hopes Lumiiio’s work will help families like his. “We’re going to be able to help prevent a lot more of what happened to my son and many others,” he says.

A Ndromeda Medical I Maging

When someone has a stroke, every second matters — two million neurons are lost every minute following a stroke — so UCalgary researchers developed a technique to shave minutes off the time needed to diagnose them.

A stroke happens when blood flow to the brain is interrupted by an obstacle in a blood vessel. The current method to find the blockage requires three main steps: a CT scan, a CT angiogram and CT perfusion. The last two require dye to be injected into the blood vessels. Dr. Philip Barber, an associate professor of neurology and radiology, Dr. Christopher d’Esterre, a former adjunct professor, and Connor McDougall, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Radiology at the Cumming School of Medicine, created an imaging technique, known as SPIRAL, that can identify the blockage in a more streamlined way. With SPIRAL, a patient only needs one scan, and it does not need to be analyzed by a specialist. This means that clinicians in rural areas can make treatment decisions without having to send a patient to a larger centre. SPIRAL not only shaves minutes off stroke treatment decisions crucial for saving brain cells, but permits essential diagnostic technology for making these decisions to be available to all stroke patients at community hospitals in Alberta with a CT scanner.

Barber, d’Esterre and McDougall launched Andromeda Medical Imaging Systems Inc. in 2020. Now under the leadership of Barber and McDougall, the company is moving toward regulatory approval for SPIRAL.

SYANT RA INC.

In the early 2010s, Dr. Kenneth Fuh (Avenue’s Top 40 Under 40 Class of 2022) and colleagues at UCalgary identified a molecular signature for breast cancer that could be picked up in a blood sample. They founded Syantra in 2016 with the hopes of scaling the technology to provide cancer testing to patients around the world. The company’s flagship product, the trademarked Syantra DX Breast Cancer test, is a molecular assay for detecting an active breast cancer signature from a blood sample. It’s currently available to women in 120 cities across Canada for $499. By this summer, Syantra DX will be available to patients in the United States, and, the company hopes, in Europe and the Middle East before year’s end.

S Olis

The beauty industry has a dirty secret: makeup brushes take ages to clean properly, but failing to do so can spread diseases like herpes and pink eye. Enter Rana Hyatt, a professional hair and makeup artist with a degree in sociology and chemistry from UCalgary. In 2018 Hyatt had the idea for a portable waterless brush sanitizer that cleans all powdered products and kills germs in a 60-second blitz, using UVC-LED technology. Stuck at home during the first waves of the COVID pandemic in 2020, she decided to bring her idea to life. Retailing for $499, the Airdrie-made product sold out of pre-sales at the end of 2022 and is now available for purchase again.

BY SEAN P. YOUNG

arry Woolliams is the type of farmer that wants to yield a bumper crop every season. That’s not unique, every farmer wants a bumper (an exceptionally large harvest). But Woolliams leaves little to chance when going after his goal.

“I’m always looking at what I need to do to take my business to the next level and technology definitely helps me do that,” he says.

Woolliams is a fifth-generation farmer. His family homesteaded in the Calgary area in 1890 and he and his wife now run Woolliams Farms Ltd., a 9,000-acre plot in Rocky View County growing wheat, yellow peas, canola and malt barley. His family has a long history of innovation, whether by adopting new farming methods, dabbling in crop experimentation or seeking out technology. In addition to being a shrewd farmer, his dad was an astute businessman, looking to harness the latest technologies to improve his chances of success. “Dad was actually one of the first people in Alberta to ever use yield mapping and variable rate technology for fertilizer,”

Woolliams says. “He had a big old computer that was bolted in the combine.”

Farming has become a complex business, but the goal has always been the same: The more you can crop out of a piece of land (or “yield”) using the least amount of “inputs” (mainly seed, fertilizer, chemicals, water and labour), the more money you make. And technologies like yield mapping, a technique that uses GPS data to show precisely how fields are performing each season, is helping balance out the equation for farmers.

It has evolved drastically since Woolliams’ father first adopted it in the mid ’80s. Woolliams now uses a suite of precision agriculture tools that record his yields as they are being harvested. Sensors on his combines measure the quality and amount of grain along with the exact GPS coordinates where it was harvested. These data points autonomously produce yield maps, showing Woolliams’ high- and low-performing areas. “The long-term goal is better the ground for growing, or start saving inputs on the bad parts of the land,” Woolliams says. “You don’t want to fertilize or spray those low-lying areas or hilltops that won’t produce anything.”

Woolliams uses these maps the next time he plants, feeding in more historical data for the software to use regarding his inputs. Every year he uses these tools, the stronger and more precise the analysis and predictions become.

GPS technology and map data also help for more precise planting. A common money suck for farmers during seeding is overlap, when rows of seed are planted too close together, wasting a portion of a crucial input. Autosteer, as the name suggests, automatically steers the tractor along straight lines, curves or concentric circles to sub-inch accuracy, making planting, spraying and harvesting way more exact than a human driver could achieve alone. “I used to budget for 10 per cent overlap when seeding, now it’s down to two per cent. That’s a huge difference,” Woolliams says.