BY: Kari Klassen

Lakehead University and Camphill Communities Ontario have teamed up to do qualitative research on the well-being of residents (also known as companions) of the not-for-profit organization.

Located in Angus, Ontario, Camphill provides adult-centered residential programs for people with developmental disabilities. Camphill is home to a biodynamic farm, garden, herbery, bakery, pottery studio, woodworking shop, and performance hall, and offers day programs, arts and crafts, artistic and wellness activities, as well as social and cultural opportunities for residents.

Dr. Sonia Mastrangelo, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University and lead researcher on the study, has spent time at Camphill, observing the facilities, engaging the companions, while they are at work or during their own leisure time.

“I was really impressed. I’d heard of the wonderful Camphill program in the past when an adult on the autism spectrum I was working with considered a placement there," said Mastrangelo.

"When you spend time on the property, you get this beautiful feeling of camaraderie. Everyone is smiling; everyone is working the land. It really is a place where they focus on self-determinism and adults have choice as to what their day looks like.”

The study Mastrangelo and her team will be leading looks at a human rights framework where people with disabilities have the right to accessible, appropriate and evidence-based services that enable them to achieve their personal goals and enjoy a good quality of life.

“With our study, what we typically see happening is people in the field do research on individuals with disabilities rather than with them and therefore disempowering starts to happen," Mastrangelo explained.

"Those who are in vulnerable situations, those with disabilities being part of that, almost lose their voice. What we’ve attempted to do is adopt a community-based participatory action research model," said Mastrangelo.

"We looked at what makes an effective partnership between universities and not-for-profits, because that’s really what Camphill is. It’s very different from partnering with a for-profit.”

Companions are going to be heavily invested in the research process to the extent that some of them will be hired to assist in the research project.

“They’ll be co-creators of the research," explained Mastrangelo. "For example, we are putting a documentary together and we are going to invite the companions that are tech-savvy to support the production of the documentary. They’ll be making decisions on what gets screened, what gets included, what the editing process looks like and they’ll be paid out of the grant.”

Mastrangelo and her team will also be conducting video-based observation where they take video footage of the Companions working at different stations and will then conduct video interviews with those Companions.

“We’re going to explore their lived experiences at Camphill and what that looks like. The interviews will include what their roles and responsibilities are, how much choice they have, what their leisure activities are and how much involvement they have with the community," Mastrangelo said.

There are two main goals for the project.

“The big goal is building knowledge and understanding about the well-being of adults with developmental disabilities and figuring out what they need, from both an education and critical disabilities standpoint. The other goal is providing a high-quality research training experience for graduate students, because they’ll be involved in all stages of the research process," she said.

Mastrangelo hopes the Camphill project will become a pilot for how other organizations can draw on some of the strengths of the program.

“What (Camphill) has shared with me is that they get so many phone calls asking how they got started and how others can make this happen in their own communities.”

The team hopes to document outcomes related to both the challenges Camphill experienced as they began to grow, as well as the successes and strengths of the program.

“We hope to mobilize this knowledge to both academic and non-academic audiences, because all too often research happens in a bubble and then it sits on a shelf," said Mastrangelo. "It’s not used. We want other organizations to be able to refer to the Camphill research and therefore we have a wide-reaching dissemination plan. We hope the documentary and the creation of a website does that.”

Mastrangelo’s research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

By: Kari Klassen

With the world becoming increasingly more dependent on smart devices, the importance of components that can be used by various devices and employed in a variety of applications, at the same time, cannot be overstated.

Imagine a smartphone, for example, with three different antennas for varying purposes. Its unwieldy design would likely render it dysfunctional.

“We can see the result of these innovations happening right in front of our eyes as the size of modern smart gadgets keeps reducing,” said Dr. Farhan Ghaffar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lakehead University.

Ghaffar’s research aims to make our technology more agile by creating adaptable components with multipurpose applications that are intelligent, while providing immense miniaturization.

“The research mainly focuses on the design of smart radio frequency components that can be used in a variety of applications such as autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things (IoT), cellular communication, etc.,” Ghaffar said. “The fundamental idea of this work is to contribute to the infrastructure development of 5G and IoT communications.”

Ghaffar explains that easily reconfigurable components help in the miniaturization of wireless systems, while also reducing production costs.

“The heart of the research is a novel technology known as Frequency Microwave Substrate (FPMS) that has not been deeply investigated and can work as a platform for a variety of electronic systems and sub-systems. My team and I will try to find theoretical and practical models for this topic that can neatly answer the questions governing 5G communication," he explained.

This work will find its application in various wireless technologies, but to provide an example that readers can more easily understand, Ghaffar points to the driverless car.

“In the near future humans aspire to replace the current automotive technology with self-driven or driverless cars that will be completely capable of maneuvering themselves once they know the final destination," said Ghaffar.

"These cars will follow all the rules of the road. They will come to a complete stop at a stop sign or a red traffic light. They will detect and follow the speed limits, and other traffic laws," he explained.

"The smart wireless sensors proposed in this research will be the eyes and ears of the driverless cars without which the concept cannot be materialized.”

Other than autonomous vehicles or driverless cars, modern applications such as mobile communications, aviation and space technology, and the health care system all rely on intelligent electronic systems that need component level agility and system level adaptability that meet their necessary requirements.

Ghaffar believes the research on this fresh FPMS technology holds the answer to the challenges of all these wireless applications.

Ghaffar was awarded a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant for his reconfigurability of microwave devices research. He is also a co-inventor on three international patents with application in the biomedical, automotive radar and manufacturing technology industries, with a fourth one filed in August 2020.

By: Kari Klassen

Dr. Chris Murray, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Lakehead University, is in his third year of the Beausoleil First Nation wind and water monitoring project. The main focus of the project is to help the Beausoleil community address climate change and the lack of information around changing weather.

“As an island community they’re isolated,” Murray said, “and they’re very susceptible to changes. The Office of Indigenous Initiatives reached out to me and what had initially interested me was an ice road that was no longer used.”

Residents of the island had previously been able to go back and forth to the mainland from Cedar Point over the ice road, but due to weather changes, they haven’t been able to use it for about a decade. “It’s a function of the unpredictable ice. It might be 20 feet thick on one side of the island, because the wind has piled it up, or it might not be there at all on the other side of the island. It’s just the way things are changing and becoming more erratic.”

Ice used to be measured by drilling a hole into it, putting a stick down and then measuring the depth on the stick, but that can only be done on the shore. It wouldn’t tell anyone how deep the ice is enroute or at the other end. “That was what intrigued me, so I helped develop an ice thickness monitor that is still a prototype, but we haven’t gotten it to a user-friendly version yet,” he said “That’s why I got involved.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, Murray ended up spending much more time on setting up weather stations. “It was a learning experience, for sure, as I am not a field scientist.”

The stations provide information to the community, in real time, about the weather in and around the island. They measure wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, air temperature, humidity, as well as the water level. The information supports the community directly with accurate weather information, but also allows them to track trends, combined in a digital file with their traditional ecological information, which is essentially oral history.

Information from the weather projects is also woven into the education of K-12 students on the island. “I take the research that we’ve been doing for two years and make that into a science outreach project. We’ve been to the elementary school, through Zoom, something like 50 times this semester. Every class has had at least seven visits from me or my students.” Not every class focuses on the weather stations, but many do.

“The teachers are amazing. Everything we’ve asked them to do is enthusiastically embraced. Hopefully this will keep going, year after year, and we’ll eventually get to a point where the community is much more aware of what we’re doing because their kids are coming home and talking about it.”

During Lakehead University’s Research and Innovation Week in 2021, Murray and Nancy Assance, Department of Education at Beausoleil First Nation, were the recipients of the Indigenous Partnership Research Award.

By: Kari Klassen

Amir Ameli, Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering department, is an early career researcher at Lakehead University, and is already demonstrating a building capacity in his field that will apply to our local economy, society and beyond.

With the ever-expanding need for more energy to run the systems of our world, cybersecurity becomes an increasingly important concern.

“Cyber-attacks against power systems are growing in their number and complexity,” Ameli said. “Given that power grids are among the most critical infrastructure that societies highly depend on, many attackers have focused their attention on these grids. Targeting power systems can result in severe consequences, such as instability of the grid, or a blackout.”

High-profile cyber-attacks, such as the 2015 BlackEnergy trojan that left about half the homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region (a population of 1.4 million) without power, show an urgent need for greater vigilance and protection.

“What (the cyber-attackers) do is slowly propagate into the system and gain information about at what point and at what direction they could create the maximum damage,” Ameli said. “It’s the stealthy nature of the cyber-attacks that is the most important challenge, since it makes it difficult for us, as power engineers, to detect cyber-attacks.”

While there are several layers involved in protecting power systems against cyber-attacks, Ameli’s area of research focuses on securing the cyber layer using the physical attributes of the system.

“My research builds the last line of defense to protect the system against those cyber-attacks that have already entered the system from the cyber layer, and tries to detect and mitigate them in the physical layer,” he explained. “What we do is different, but in line with what network security experts do to make power systems resilient to cyber-attacks.”

Ameli was awarded a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant valued at $152,500 for his research project and he’s hopeful that several other grant proposals to different funding agencies will award him similar success.

“Immediately after I was hired, I started writing my NSERC DG proposal, which was my first funding proposal ever,” Ameli said.  “Luckily it was accepted with very positive peer-review comments.”

Ameli’s research has also received attention locally. Lakehead and the City of Orillia have solidified a partnership that will see Ameli lead a team to determine the feasibility of Orillia becoming a cybersecurity industry hub. The City of Orillia has earmarked $25,000 toward the project, and a $25,000 NSERC Alliance Grant has also been secured.

“To use my expertise in a way that will benefit the economic development of our community is very satisfying,” he said.

Currently in the process of hiring students to assist him on his projects, Ameli has hired two master’s and one PhD student, and is planning on hiring several more master’s and PhD students.

“There are always open positions in my group for motivated and qualified students who have a background in power system cyber-security and protection. Such students are always welcome to contact me.”

BY JULIO HELENO GOMES

A Lakehead University research project focusing on illicit drug use in Thunder Bay found that people are unaware of what drugs they’re putting in their bodies — a situation that can have drastic consequences.

“That’s really concerning when we are looking at the issue of people who are having accidental overdoses,” says Dr. Abigale Sprakes. “What it tells us is that there is an unsafe drug supply, in the sense that people are getting drugs that they believe are one thing and using them unaware of what they are using, and then are not able to make informed decisions about their use.”

Sprakes, an assistant professor in Lakehead’s school of Social Work, led the study along with graduate student Brooke Raynsford. Nearly 100 individuals replied to a survey and provided urine samples to determine the drugs in their system. The results showed 69-per-cent of participants had used drugs that they were unaware of, and of those substances, 43-per-cent were unknown opiates, such as fentanyl, and 40-per-cent were unknown benzodiazepines, a type of sedative used to treat anxiety and panic attacks.

“To have unknown opiates like fentanyl and benzodiazepines in their system indicates an unsafe drug supply in Thunder Bay and an increased risk of overdose,” Sprakes says.

Along with learning what substances people were taking, the researchers also asked about a person’s history of drug overdose, of using alone, and how they utilized harm reduction services. Nearly two-thirds of participants reported using alone and 43-per-cent reported overdosing in the last six months. The combination of unsafe supply, using alone, and a history of overdose increases the risk of a future overdose, Sprakes notes.

Raynsford’s role was to input the survey results, identify trends, and break down demographic information as well as review relevant literature. This was part of her Master in social work studies and was similar to what she’s been doing with other groups.

“I was surprised by the ways in which the project would be able to guide and inform the work of the Thunder Bay Drug Strategy and other community agencies,” says Raynsford, a registered social worker. “Although not directly linked to the study results, the main conclusion I drew was the importance of representing the voices of individuals accessing services, especially in the harm reduction field.”

With the support of the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, this study is part of a nation-wide initiative. In Thunder Bay, the district health unit has reported a spike in paramedic calls regarding opiate overdoses, as well as increasing opioid-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Deaths have risen steadily over the last four years, including at least 80 in 2021. 

Sprakes performed this research in partnership with NorWest Community Health Centres, whose staff set up contact with clients and helped develop the questionnaire. The issue is important in light of the surge of drug overdoses and trying to understand why people use substances alone, says NWCHC chief executive officer Juanita Lawson. 

“If you talk to anyone working in the field of harm reduction, it’s very clear that the use of opiates and opiate-related deaths – in our region and across Canada – continues to be a crisis,” Lawson says. “This study helps us understand some of the work that needs to happen with individuals who use substances to increase awareness and ultimately reduce the deaths that are taking place when individuals use substances alone.

“The results of this study validate the important work taking place in our community to decrease stigma and create space to talk about mental health and addictions,” Lawson adds.

Raynsford, who spent four years as a summer student with the Thunder Bay Drug Strategy and the Crime Prevention Council, hopes this research will benefit the community “by providing clear evidence of substance use trends and clarity around what services are or are not being used.” By collecting this information the community can target interventions and address gaps in service, she suggests.

Sprakes will eventually publish the research results and she plans to present the findings to the community through forums such as those arranged by the Thunder Bay Drug Strategy and St. Joseph’s Care Group. She also hopes to follow-up this study’s findings with a new study that will interview individuals who use drugs alone.

“The next step now is to talk with people about their experiences of drug utilization, overdose, and how they’re trying to keep themselves safe, so they don’t become a statistic in this opiate overdose epidemic that we’re seeing in Thunder Bay right now,” she says.

Research in Action highlights the work of Lakehead University in various fields of research.

By Julio Heleno Gomes

 A mobile app that offers different strategies to deal with everyday stressful situations can help a cross-section of young people. For those struggling with adverse childhood experiences, the JoyPop app is particularly useful, says a Lakehead University researcher.

“What we found is that the benefits, in terms of building better coping skills, were especially prominent for youths who had experienced things like abuse or neglect at home. They actually saw better improvement in terms of their emotion regulation skills when they were using the app,” says Dr. Aislin Mushquash, an assistant professor in Psychology.

Mushquash and her team from the Coping Research Lab just completed a study of the resilience intervention tool called JoyPop. Developed by researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton and Clearbridge Mobile, the smartphone app offers a menu of items to help de-stress the mind and body, such as deep breathing exercises, journalling or connecting to a support system through a Circle of Trust.

“The features were designed to support youth in better regulating their emotions and their experiences,” Mushquash explains. “They allow users to understand what they’re feeling in the moment, to track their mood and then suggest features or activities to use.

“It allows users to get out of their head and focus on something in the moment, if they’re feeling overwhelmed by anything that’s going on in their personal life or at school.”

The project to evaluate the app involved 156 participants enrolled at Lakehead, who would use it for at least 15 minutes a day over the course of a month. The study centred on first-year students because of the potentially challenging experiences they would face at this crucial stage in their lives.

“It’s a brand new experience for them, for opportunities but also for potential stressful situations,” Mushquash notes. “So we wanted to evaluate whether the JoyPop app could be used as a tool to better support youth as they navigate the transition to university.”

Graduate student Angela MacIsaac was attracted by this novel tool that helps people tap into coping skills, manage their emotions and create positive experiences.

I was intrigued by the way a smartphone app allows you to combine various strategies into one intervention,” says MacIsaac, who’s in her first year of Lakehead’s PhD program in clinical psychology. “Using the JoyPop app improved emotion regulation and also reduced depression symptoms,” and the more that individuals used it the more benefits they saw.

“It helps youth exercise agency in proactively taking care of their own well-being. It allows them to practice strategies and skills that can help with self-regulation,” MacIsaac says.

The research team also included PhD student Shakira Mohammed and undergraduate student Elizabeth Grassia, as well as undergraduate volunteer research assistants Haleigh Kearns, Alacia Tshilombo, Melissa Beaucage, Laija Beaulieu, Kaitlyn Kotala and Mary Cassano.

Funding for the study was provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Having shown the app is useful for young people heading off to university who come from different backgrounds, including those dealing with lingering childhood challenges, the next step is to see if the app can be incorporated into other settings.

“Now that we have these data and the positive result suggesting this is helpful for youth, we’re looking at how the JoyPop app may be helpful for youth who are seeking mental health services in the community,” Mushquash says.

She has partnered with Children’s Centre Thunder Bay and Dilico Anishinabek Family Care to determine if youth coming to them could benefit from using the JoyPop app.

“What we’ll be evaluating is to see if using the app while waiting for services leads to better abilities to manage emotions and improvement in mental health symptoms,” she says. “And from the service side, does it prepare youth better to access counselling? If youth are using the app to tap into their emotions, to think about how they’ve been feeling for a few weeks before seeing a counsellor, they may be in a better position to benefit from the counselling services.”

With funding from the Thunder Bay Community Foundation, this project will continue over the course of a year.

The JoyPop app is available for purchase from the iTunes store. Organizations interested in using and evaluating the app can contact Mushquash directly at aislin.mushquash@lakeheadu.ca.

 Research in Action highlights the work of Lakehead University in various fields of research.

Portrait photo: Dr. Aislin Mushquash is an assistant professor in Lakehead’s department of Psychology.

 Pic 2 (group of 3 people): Dr. Aislin Mushquash, centre, discusses research on the JoyPop app with Lakehead students Elizabeth Grassia, left, and Shakira Mohammed.

May 2021, by Julio Heleno Gomes 

With spring around the corner and the ground beginning to thaw, a device being developed by a Lakehead University researcher could be a new tool for the City of Thunder Bay to improve inspection of its network of underground sanitary sewer pipes.

Using a probe outfitted with sensors and a camera, this device could detect sewer defects and pipe damage, which would benefit the city’s wastewater system.

“We hope the device is easy to use and will successfully detect infiltration above and below the sewer surface inside the collection pipe,” says Michelle Warywoda, Director of Environment, Infrastructure and Operations for the City of Thunder Bay.

“We hope that results from the sewer pipe inspections with the device will inform the City’s sanitary sewer system capital replacement and rehabilitation program.”

Dr. Amir Azimi is working on a project to detect faults along the city’s 515 kilometres of sanitary sewer pipes. During spring snow melt or severe rainfall, heavy moisture infiltrates the ground and if there’s a crack in the sewer additional water will flow into the collection system, mixing with sewage.

Conventional inspection and monitoring is done via closed circuit TV cameras, which is labour intensive and requires trained operators.

“That’s not feasible and is very expensive,” Azimi says of that method.

An associate professor in the department of Civil Engineering, Azimi’s research focus is hydraulics and environmental fluid mechanics.

In the case of sewer pipes, residential wastewater is typically at room temperature (in the 20 C range), whereas water from snowmelt is only about 5 C. The resulting temperature difference would indicate a flaw somewhere in the drainage pipe.

Azimi’s device consists of a temperature probe, thermal camera, GPS locator, battery and memory card. It would maneuver through the pipe and take temperature readings. It can record differences of as little as one degree Celsius.

“We drop it in a manhole, it flows with the sewage, we retrieve it downstream, grab the data and look at the temperature variations,” Azimi says of how the device will be utilized. “If the temperature is constant, it’s OK. But at one line it could be 18 degrees, 18 degrees and then it drops to 14 degrees and then goes back to 18. When the temperature goes down, you know something is going on in the pipe.

“This is not very difficult to measure and it’s very fast and cheap.”

By detecting defects in the sewer pipes, rehabilitation work can be targeted by sending closed-circuit TV cameras to a specific spot to verify there’s a problem. This will reduce the infiltration of groundwater into the sanitary sewer system, Warywoda explains.

Azimi has been working on this device with a team of students: graduate student Xunjia Liang and undergraduates Gurpreet Chaggar and Adam Talbot.

Along with grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Azimi has also received support from the City. He has been working on a combination of sensors and five different prototypes. But the device is not yet ready to be used in the field.

“That was not the plan for the funding,” Azimi says. “Funding was for the proof of concept, to see if we could build the submarine device and to see if the sensors would work.”

Due to COVID-19 the next stage in the project development is currently on hold but will resume once the graduate student researchers are able to reconvene.

When things return to normal, Azimi hopes to run more tests, such as try to determine the rate of flow through a crack and the minimal difference in temperatures the probe could detect. The concept has other applications, such as measuring the salinity of lakes or the pH levels of industrial discharge.

The potential of wireless monitoring of sewer pipes is enough that Warywoda imagines it could become a part of the City’s regular sewer inspection program. The benefits are obvious: when you reduce the volume of groundwater entering the sewer, less wastewater goes to the Water Pollution Control Plant for treatment, saving on energy, chemical usage and equipment run time.

“That translates to a reduction in maintenance and operational costs,” Warywoda says.

The pipes, which are variously made of concrete, plastic, clay, steel, asbestos-cement and wood stave, are on average more than 50 years old and are susceptible to damage and deterioration.

“Tree roots can get into the cracks in pipes or between pipe joints,” Warywoda says. “Pipes can also become misaligned or crack from movement of soils around them.”

Research in Action highlights the work of Lakehead University in various fields of research.

 – Thunder Bay, Ont. New research by Lakehead University anthropologist Dr. Jessica Metcalfe and colleagues provides direct evidence for long-distance connections among precolonial Dene peoples from northern Canada to the southern United States. About 800 years ago a group of highly successful hunter-gatherers spent several decades living on the north shore of Great Salt Lake, Utah. Archaeological evidence suggests that these ‘Promontory people’ were Dene ancestors whose moccasin styles indicate an origin in the Canadian Subarctic, more than 1,500 km to the north. Dr. Metcalfe’s research shows the Promontory people also made at least one journey even farther into the south and/or east, bringing back a scrap of leather that they incorporated into one of their distinctive moccasins. “We can take a tiny piece of leather and determine if it has chemical signatures that are typical of the place where it was found, or if it came from somewhere else,” said Dr. Metcalfe, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University. “Most of the Promontory materials were obtained close to the site, but this piece of leather came from far away – probably hundreds of kilometres to the south or east.” Use of these cutting-edge techniques in archaeology is growing, but Dr. Metcalfe said this is the first time past human migrations have been reconstructed using chemical traces in footwear. This research contributes to a longstanding archaeological puzzle: how and when did the Dene language family spread from the Canadian Subarctic into the American Southwest? During the colonial period, these populations were seen as geographically separate and thought to have no direct connections with one another. However, Dr. Metcalfe’s research suggests that Dene groups travelled great distances to gain and utilize landscape knowledge. This likely facilitated the gradual migration of Dene ancestors from the Subarctic to the Southwest. Recently, Dene people from northern, southern, and coastal nations have gathered at workshops and conferences held in Tsuut’ina territory (southern Alberta) to share their interconnected languages and cultures and to chart directions for the future. The research of Dr. Metcalfe and her colleagues, along with genetic, linguistic, and oral history evidence, demonstrates that Dene connections are not a recent phenomenon – long-distance migrations and meetings of Dene peoples have been occurring for many hundreds of years. Dr. Metcalfe’s research was published in the premier North American archaeology journal, American Antiquity, available here: https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2020.116 Other members of the research team include Dr. John (Jack) W. Ives and Jennifer Hallson (University of Alberta), Dr. Beth Shapiro and Sabrina Shirazi (University of California, Santa Cruz), Dr. Kevin P. Gilmore (HDR), Dr. Fiona Brock (Cranfield University), and Dr. Bonnie J. Clark (University of Denver). The research was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grants awarded to Dr. Metcalfe and Dr. Ives.

left: Dr. Deborah Scharf, assistant professor at Lakehead University, is a clinical and health psychologist, right: PhD student Amanda Ruck

Published by The Chronicle Journal on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020

By Julio Heleno Gomes

A program that lends a helping hand to people who are living with addictions and are at risk for contracting serious diseases is getting a boost from researchers at Lakehead University.

NorWest Community Health Centres has developed a project to have people with “lived experience” provide support and guidance for those using injection and inhalation drug equipment. This peer mentorship program was launched in April 2019 and the participation of Lakehead faculty and a graduate student has already borne fruit.

“It’s easy to make assumptions that the program is working and that there’s value added. But we wanted to make sure these are not assumptions,” says Juanita Lawson, Chief Executive Officer of NorWest CHCs. “It helps to solidify that this is a program we want to continue, we want to adopt and we want to foster.”

NorWest CHCs focus on primary health care, prevention and health promotion in the city of Thunder Bay as well as Armstrong and Longlac. With $281,000 in funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada, they started a program to have peers provide education and support to people who may be at risk for sharing drug-use equipment, in hopes of reducing risk-taking behaviour. HIV and hepatitis C can be spread through the sharing of needles and pipes.

Dr. Deborah Scharf, who has worked with NorWest CHCs, was asked to help shape and evaluate the program. Along with PhD student Amanda Ruck she met with NorWest CHCs staff to develop a framework for research.

“We benefit at the university when we partner with community groups,” says Scharf, a clinical and health psychologist, and assistant professor of Psychology at Lakehead. “It offers students real-life learning experiences and the opportunity to give back to the community we live in. This is an ideal project for us because not only are the staff of the program benefitting, but we are also as partners in research. It’s a pleasure to be able to support the organizations that do good in our community.”

Ruck, who holds a Master’s degree in Public Health with Specialization in Nursing, started on the project as a research co-ordinator and has since made it a component of her PhD studies.

“I got involved to gain more experience and it’s a topic of interest to me,” she says.

Scharf says Ruck has been “absolutely critical” to the success of the project. She also acknowledges the work of Michelle Kolobutrin, project co-ordinator at NorWest CHCs, and Lakehead researchers Dr. Rebecca Schiff and Dr. Anna Koné.

Ruck conducted a review of the literature to show what’s being done in terms of using peers in substance use harm reduction initiatives and how their experiences help to form what they’re doing.

“The focus when you’re doing harm reduction is preventing harm associated with the substance use rather than preventing the use itself,” Ruck explains.

“The peers are the champions of the program. They work with the outreach worker to help engage the hard-to-reach population.”

The participants — who are variously referred to as peer specialists, peer advocates or peer navigators — possess “lived experience.” That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re former users. They can also be close family members or friends.

“It’s not necessarily that the person has a history of injection drug use,” Scharf says. “They’re very well-connected to that community and can speak to the wants, the needs, the likes and dislikes. They sort of speak the same language, so they can help make a program that’s both useful and attractive to the community.”

Along with the review of the literature, Ruck also tracked key data, such as how many presentations were made by the peers and outreach workers, as well as the distribution of needles and naloxone kits (which can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose). She also interviewed staff and peers to determine roles and identify barriers to the program.

A key research component of the project is Photo Voice, where participants showcase their experiences through photos and interviews.

“It’s a photo representation of the volunteer peers’ experience in the program, to help give them a voice,” Ruck says.

One of the insights from the literature review is how programs look in other places and how they should look in the North — which presents a whole set of challenges.

“We have a smaller community, different resources, different geography,” Scharf notes. “So how can we take the nuts and bolts of what we know about a good peer harm reduction program elsewhere and apply them effectively and in a culturally responsible way, in a way that fits with the community here to make it the best we can?”

The project is funded to March 2021 and involves three staff positions and three peers. Along with outreach and engagement to people who share drug-use equipment, the program also offers peers an opportunity to become more engaged with NorWest CHCs.

“We see value in bringing people into the organization who help us move forward and do some learning around what is harm reduction and really focusing on the social determinants of health,” Lawson says. “So they keep us honest, keep us real in terms of living to and abiding by our vision mission and the values of the organization.”

-- 30 --

Photo credit NorWest Community Health Centres: NorWest Community Health Centres’ harm reduction team consists of Josh Fraser, Keeshaw Bauer and Laurie Clarke.

Photo 1: Lakehead University professor Dr. Abdelhamid Tayebi joins graduate student Zeke Sedor as fellow student Geordi McGrath, right, goes over the cameras placed on an unmanned aerial vehicle.

 Photo 2: Lakehead University professor Dr. Abdelhamid Tayebi, right, watches graduate student Zeke Sedor operate an unmanned aerial vehicle at the school’s Automatic Control Laboratory.

Published in the Chronicle Journal Thursday, July 26, 2018.

Imagine this: there’s a car crash on a highway and a First Aid kit arrives within minutes. Smoke is detected on a remote mountain and firefighting crews are dispatched to the hot spot. An alarm sounds at a nuclear power plant and damage assessment begins immediately.
In all of these scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, could play a pivotal role.
“You can equip drones with whatever you want, then you can send them to places where it’s dangerous to send humans or difficult to send robots,” suggests Dr. Abdelhamid Tayebi.
“But that’s a goal,” he cautions, “that’s a little bit far in the future.”
Tayebi, an Electrical Engineering professor at Lakehead University, has been working to make UAVs fully autonomous. That means, essentially, developing drones that can accomplish a task without human intervention.
“That’s the ultimate goal of all the people working in this area,” Tayebi explains. “It’s to one day send a UAV from some location, give it GPS co-ordinates and then the UAV goes to that location, choosing the best route to avoid obstacles and collision.”
There are a multitude of issues that have to be overcome before the skies are abuzz with drones, though. Tayebi acknowledges the huge task of building transmitters and receivers to track a drone’s exact position and then how to efficiently control a device the weight and size of a toy.
Progress is taking place at a small office on campus, the Automatic Control Laboratory, of which Tayebi is the director. On any given day, two graduate students are working on standard four-propellor drones, writing computer code, fixing minor mechanical issues and seeing where that takes them.
“It’s a real challenge,” says Geordi McGrath, a Master’s student in Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This work is a good culmination of what you learned in undergrad studies.
“Electrical engineering is very math heavy, so using equations from calculus and physics to control a physical system is quite satisfying.”
McGrath’s focus is on the two cameras mounted on the UAV, trying to figure out how the drone can know where it is based on what it sees. Getting the cameras properly calibrated has been both tedious and exhilarating.
“When I finally was able to complete the calibration successfully, there was such a relief,” he says. “But at the same time it was frustrating because it was a single mistake that caused months of issues.”
His colleague, Zeke Sedor, faces other challenges. On the white tile floor of the lab is the black outline of a large circle. His objective is to get the drone to fly in a particular path — in this case, follow the circle while airborne.
“Everything right now works, but nothing works together really well,” Sedor says.
“It sounds simple, but it’s really not,” he continues. “You first have to control the orientation to get it flat. Then, depending on the final position and the velocity information available from the sensors, you have to control the orientation to control the movement of the drone. That is a lot more complicated than it sounds. ‘Let’s trace a circle for the drone.’ It should be easy, but — ”
“Pretty much everything we’re doing,” McGrath adds, “sounds simple in concept, but the execution is the challenge,”
Tayebi can appreciate what his students are going through. He’s been at this research for 15 years and knows the hurdles that need to be overcome to make mini-aircraft available for a variety of important tasks.
“I tell my students it’s much easier to control a big spacecraft or satellite than to control a small drone,” he says, explaining that larger crafts have delicate and expensive sensors that you can’t afford for drones.
“These are challenging problems and we’re working on it. We have solved a few problems and there are other problems we’re trying to solve,” Tayebi acknowledges. “We’re still progressing.”