Grant: Applied Research Tools and Instruments Grants

NAIT's Centre for Sensors and System Integration (CSSI) supports industry partners with their sensor-based challenges by developing prototypes focused on sensors for measurement, monitoring, and instrumentation. With the current trend of Industry 4.0 and digitalization, these sensor innovations are now commonly incorporated into wireless communications and networking systems, commonly referred to as Internet of Things (IoT). The region does not currently have a comprehensive test ecosystem, therefore there is reliance on test equipment only available elsewhere (outside the province), or work is carried out with incomplete test suites. This is inconvenient, cost prohibitive and slow to produce meaningful results. The lack of access to test equipment is a major barrier to innovation as the capital costs associated with acquiring such infrastructure, and hiring and training the necessary personnel, are severely cost prohibitive, particularly for SMEs. To bridge this innovation capacity issue, CSSI proposes to purchase a suite of IoT test and characterization equipment to help industry partners more quickly and easily test and validate their innovative IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies. The ability to test such products/solutions in the proposed test ecosystem would also be of benefit to our partner organizations within the post-secondary and public sectors, for applications such as smart sensors for monitoring operation processes, autonomous vehicle development, and other innovations.*