Program Overview
What is CREATE-BEST?
CREATE-BEST is a graduate student training program funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada under the Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program. BEST is short for Biomedical Engineering Smartphone Training.
CREATE-BEST provides training and employment-ready skills to engineering students to meet the needs of the growing mHealth marketplace.
What is mHealth?
mHealth is the practice of clinical healthcare and public health supported by mobile devices. This includes mobile device applications for collecting community and clinical health data; healthcare information delivery to practitioners, researchers, and patients; real-time patient monitoring; and direct provision of care via mobile technology.
Mission Statement
The CREATE-BEST program enhances graduate student training by providing employment ready skills and knowledge to meet the needs of the growing mHealth marketplace. The program provides essential learning opportunities for app creation, oral and written communication, collaboration and teamwork, ethics, regulatory systems, project management and adaptability, entrepreneurship, clinical experiences, and industry internship opportunities.
Program Objectives
Provide participants with skills to:
- Conceive, design, and build mHealth apps.
- Design and implement an evaluation protocol for apps.
- Identify a commercialization pathway to bring a mHealth app to the appropriate market.
- Communicate with various multi-disciplinary audiences to identify patient and clinical needs, obtain ethics approvals, end-user support, financial backing, etc.
- Understand the regulatory environment for mHealth applications.
Program Requirements
In addition to the student’s academic program, CREATE-BEST participants are required to complete the following ten modules. Completion of these module will also entitle participants to a certificate of completion of the Biomedical Engineering Smartphone Training program, CREATE-BEST.
1. Advanced graduate one-semester courses-
BIOM5101/BMG5104 – Biological Signals: physiological data collection, filtering, analysis, visualization. Developed and taught by Dr. Adrian Chan (Carleton)
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BIOM5405/BMG5305 – Pattern classification and experiment design: creating data-driven analytics. Developed and taught by Dr. James Green (Carleton)
- The following courses may also be considered:
- Biomedical Engineering
- BIOM5010/BMG5112 – Introduction to Biomedical Engineering
- BIOM5100/BMG5103 – Biomedical Instrumentation
- BIOM5106/BMG5109 – Advanced Topics in Medical Instrumentation − Sensory Systems and Signal Processing
- BIOM5200/BMG5105 – Biomedical Image Processing
- BIOM5202/BMG5107 – Applications in Biomedical Image Processing
- BIOM5301/BMG5301 – Biomechanics of Skeletal System, Motion and Tissue
- BIOM5315/BMG5315 – Biorobotics
- BIOM5400/BMG5317 – Medical Computing
- BIOM5401/BMG5318 – Health Care Engineering
- BIOM5403/BMG5111 – Advanced Topics in Medical Informatics and Telemedicine – M-health, E-health and telemedicine
- Computer Science
- COMP5308/CSI5102 – Medical Computing
- COMP5107/CSI5185 – Statistical and Syntactic Pattern Recognition
- COMP5108/CSI5126 – Algorithms in Bioinformatics
- COMP5900/CSI5140 – Data Representation Learning
- COMP5900/CSI5140 – Introduction to Machine Learning
- Mathematics and Statistics
- STAT5703/MAT5181 – Data Mining
- Biology and Bioinformatics
- BIOL5515/BNF5106 – Bioinformatics
- Biomedical Engineering
- Students from non-programming backgrounds (e.g. mechanical engineering students)
- Topics include introduction to app development, sensors and bluetooth, camera and image processing, on-phone databases
Advanced experience in mobile app development
- Students with advanced programming experience (e.g. students with degrees in software engineering or a related discipline) or completion of the basic-experience course
- Topics include interacting with external databases/cloud, advanced graphics and gamification, quality assurance (version control, testing, bug tracking)
- Understand: The team shares quick 5 minute presentations on business goals, technology capability, user needs.
- Define: Start to develop a focus and strategy by defining the central journey for the end-users.
- Diverge: This phase encourages the team to generate as many ideas as possible before they commit to the best option. In this stage, everyone is encouraged to work individually to sketch ideas.
- Decide: The team reviews all the ideas from the Diverge phase and vote for the best options. The team can then choose 1-3 ideas to prototype and test.
- Prototype: Rapid prototyping allows you to test out your ideas without investing excessive time, money, or resources. Thereby, you will know earlier what aspects of your ideas fail and which have potential.
- Validate: This final phase aims to answer the hardest question in design: “Is this idea any good?”. The team should invite potential users to test their ideas while they watch and take notes as these people interact with the prototype.
More details about entrepreneurship training and how you can apply can be found here.
- Industrial internship where students are employed and paid by a company.
- Entrepreneurial internship where students with an entrepreneurial spirit can advance their own startup while being paid through the CREATE program. Students start the internship with an idea and drive the idea into a business.
- Blended internship where students interested in entrepreneurship can work for a startup.
Some internships will be partially supported through the MITACS or Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) programs.
- uOttawa’s Altitude workshops: https://altitude.uottawa.ca/en/workshops
- Carleton’s Grad Nav workshops: https://carleton.ca/gradpd/grad-navigate
- McGill’s SKILLSETS workshops: https://www.mcgill.ca/skillsets/events
- Mitacs workshops: https://altitude.uottawa.ca/en/workshops/mitacs
Visit the News section to see upcoming activities organized by CREATE-BEST.
Funding
Three forms of funding are available to students:
- research stipends
- conference attendance, and
- program related travel.
Students should speak with their CREATE-BEST connected supervisor regarding their research stipend.
CREATE-BEST students will participate in national and international conferences. Students will disseminate their research, and the uniqueness and pedagogical value of the CREATE-BEST training program. This also provides students excellent networking opportunities. Funding is to provide partial financial support to each student (e.g., travel, accommodations, and registration).
Funding is available for students to travel between Montreal and Ottawa for the graduate course, workshops, symposium, retreat, and other program related activities and events.
Students should contact the program director or program coordinator for further information on conference and travel funding.