Congratulations to our students on receiving highly competitive national research awards from Canada's federal granting agencies. Omar Hassanin (PhD student) has been awarded a Canada Graduate Research Scholarship — Doctoral (CGRS-D) by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Maahika Mehta (MSc student) has been awarded a Canada Graduate Research Scholarship — Master's (CGS-M) by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Mackenzie Wallich (MSc student) has been awarded a Canada Graduate Research Scholarship — Master's (CGS-M) by NSERC. Bella An and Saman Abbasi (undergraduate students) have each been awarded an Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) by NSERC.

Summer research season is here and the Healthy City Lab is excited to welcome this year's undergraduate cohort. Bella An returns for her second summer, advancing VESTIGE — an agentic AI platform that transforms personal stories into immersive experiences for people living with dementia. Kambi Obodo is also back, building a system that recommends physiologically safer walking routes by fusing wearable biosensor data with geospatial layers like slope, shade, and real-time weather. New to the lab, Saman Abbasi is developing a smart glass navigation assistant for visually impaired users — combining object detection, vision-language models, and agentic reasoning to deliver real-time audio guidance in indoor environments. Hazem Ramadan is contributing across multiple projects, from smart insoles for frailty monitoring to a system that turns dashcam video into natural language driving narratives.

Ranuki Hettiarachchige's work, "Intersection Navigation and Speed Patterns on Familiar Routes Differentiate Older Drivers with Mild Cognitive Impairment," has been selected by the American Geriatrics Society as a Presidential Poster and as one of only seven abstracts invited for oral presentation in the Lightning Science session — the highest-rated abstrats across the AGS 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting. 

Omar Hassanin presented our systematic review on driving after traumatic brain injury at the Canadian Concussion Network 6th Annual Meeting. Our work explores how TBI — including concussion — affects driving ability, safety, and behaviour across the lifespan, drawing on evidence from seven major databases. 

Dr. Bayat delivered "Everything, everywhere, all at once: the promise of digital biomarkers in healthy and cognitive aging" at the O'Brien Institute for Public Health's 2026 Spring Forum. The talk was part of Connecting Systems, Equity and Policy: Rethinking Care in Practice — a session moderated by Dr. Kirsten Fiest that brought together researchers whose work spans clinical practice, digital innovation, and health systems transformation. Dr. Bayat presented alongside Dr. David Campbell, Dr. Tito Daodu, and Dr. Ariel Ducey.

Congratulations to lab members on seven first-author papers accepted at the 46th Annual IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference, to be held in Toronto. Accepted authors: Rashmita Chatterjee (sleep as a digital biomarker), Armin Ghayur Sadigh (greenspace quantification), Mackenzie Wallich (fairness in depression prediction), Shahab Alizadeh (foundation models for wearables), Ranuki Hettiarachchige (stop-sign behaviour as a marker of cognitive aging), Maahika Mehta (wearable gait for frailty), and Sol Morrissey (international naturalistic driving comparison).

Congratulations to Ranuki Hettiarachchige, Mackenzie Wallich, and Maahika Mehta on being named finalists in UCalgary's 3 Minute Thesis competition — three of ten finalists across the entire university, all from the Healthy City Lab. The final took place on April 16.

Ranuki Hettiarachchige's new paper proposes a next-generation framework for real-world data collection in naturalistic driving research in people with dementia. The framework improves sensor selection, behavioural standardization, and clinical relevance, using GPS and in-car sensors to better reflect everyday behaviour. Published in Gerontology. → Read more

Congratulations to lab members on five abstracts accepted at AAIC 2026 in London: Rashmita Chatterjee (context-dependent gait in Alzheimer's disease), Daksh Hathi (LLM thematic analysis of online dementia narratives), Sol Morrissey (hippocampal volume and real-world driving), Ranuki Hettiarachchige (multimodal digital markers from naturalistic driving), and Chris Pilieci & Shahab Alizadeh (perceptions of GPS-based driving monitoring).

The lab is recruiting adults 65+ for a new study exploring daily mobility patterns using smart shoes and GPS data, led by MSc student Maahika Mehta. The way people walk and move about in daily life may relate to long-term functionality and risk of frailty. Contact maahika.mehta@ucalgary.ca for more information.

The lab celebrated International Day of Women and Girls in Science, recognizing the women and girls of HCL and around the world whose dedication and curiosity drive science forward.

Dr. Bayat participated as a speaker on the academic panel at CUBEC on January 31, sharing perspectives from her human-centred research and reflecting on how interdisciplinary collaboration across engineering, health, and community partners can strengthen biomedical engineering solutions grounded in real-world contexts.

MSc student Maahika Mehta has been visiting Silvera sites this past month, hosting small information sessions to share her smart-insole gait study with residents. The visits have been a chance to listen — hearing residents' thoughts, experiences, and perspectives — and a tangible example of knowledge translation in practice.

A UCalgary News feature, "Digital fingerprint of driving patterns identified as potential predictor of Alzheimer's," highlights the lab's new route complexity metric — a way of measuring subtle navigational changes in older adults that may serve as an early indicator of cognitive decline. The work was led by graduate student Kelly Long. → Read the story

Congratulations to Shimaa Aboudeif on successfully defending her MSc thesis, "Real-World Gait Analysis for Older Adults: Identifying Optimal Gait Bouts and Reconstructing Lower-Back Signals from Wrist-Worn Devices." Shimaa's work develops methods for assessing gait in free-living conditions using only wrist-worn sensors — making real-world gait monitoring more accessible and less burdensome for older adults. → Read the thesis

Dr. Sayeh Bayat has been recognized as one of Calgary's top emerging leaders by Avenue Calgary. The feature highlights her work using AI and everyday technologies to reimagine aging and support older adults living longer, healthier, more independent lives. → Read the feature