Co-Creating Better Futures Through Connected Minds Team Grants

Too often, technology is developed for communities rather than with them.

The result is familiar. Tools that don’t reflect people’s everyday realities, systems that reinforce existing inequities, and innovations that struggle to earn trust. As intelligent technologies increasingly shape how we live, work, and communicate, the challenge isn’tsimply to innovate. It’s about making sure innovation reflects the knowledge, priorities, and experiences of the people it affects.

Connected Minds was created in response to this challenge. Recognizing that the most pressing questions emerging from our increasingly technological world cannot be addressed by any one discipline, sector, or perspective alone, the program brings together researchers, trainees, community organizations, industry partners, knowledge holders, and people with lived experience to explore how intelligent technologies affect society, and how they can be designed and used in ways that advance collective wellbeing. After all, technology doesn’t exist apart from society. It reflects the priorities, assumptions, and choices of the people who create it.

If technology reflects the people who create it, then it's equally important to understand the people shaping the research behind it. That's why we created this video series featuring Connected Minds’ Team Grants, an initiative supporting three-year interdisciplinary research projects that bring together researchers and communities to address complex societal challenges. These conversations offer a closer look at the partnerships, shared purpose, and collaborative process behind each project, and how working alongside communities shapes research from the very beginning.

Before exploring the individual projects, take a closer look at the people, partnerships, and ideas that shape Connected Minds.

The projects featured below each explore a different challenge, from AI and brain health to accessibility, the arts, and Indigenous governance. While each takes a distinct approach, they share a commitment to ensuring research and technology are developed alongside the people and communities they are intended to serve.

Creative Collectivities

As more of our lives move online, digital technologies are reshaping how we connect, create, and build community. Creative Collectivities explores these questions through collaborations between artists, researchers, and community partners, examining how emerging technologies such as AI, virtual reality, mobile media, and immersive performance are influencing collective behaviour, belonging, and civic participation.

Led by Laura Levin and Michael Wheeler, the project works alongside organizations including , , , and to imagine more inclusive technological futures. By bringing together artistic practice, community engagement, and interdisciplinary research, the team is exploring how performance can help communities critically engage with technology and shape conversations about the futures they want to build.

“We read every day about different technologies that are changing the world and the billions of dollars being invested in them, but the motivation is often profit. We’re trying to make art that moves people, art that considers the world in new ways. When we ask technologies to participate in that conversation, we get very different outcomes.”
– Michael Wheeler, Co-Principal Investigator of Creative Collectivities Team Grant

Wireless Ambulatory EEG System for Personalized Epilepsy Care

Many of the tools used to monitor neurological health were designed for clinical settings and don't always reflect the realities of living with epilepsy day to day.

To help bridge this gap, the project is developing an AI-enabled wearable EEG device designed for long-term comfort, clinical accuracy, and everyday use. Led by Hossein Kassiri and Gavin Winston, the interdisciplinary team is working alongside people with epilepsy, caregivers, clinicians, and community partners to reimagine what brain monitoring can look like beyond the clinic. By combining expertise in engineering, medicine, ethics, and social science, the project is exploring how intelligent technologies can make epilepsy care more personalized, accessible, and responsive to everyday life.

“Connected Minds has provided us with the opportunity to work with a variety of different disciplines, different faculties, different points of view, so we’ve got a spectrum of different people who are involved in the design of this device. This
means we can triangulate all the different aspects and bring those together to design a device that is effective and efficient”
– Claire Davies, Co-Investigator for Wearable EEG for Personalized Epilepsy Management Team Grant

Biskaabiiyaang: The Indigenous Metaverse

Emerging technologies are often developed within systems that don't reflect Indigenous ways of knowing, governing, and relating. Biskaabiiyaang begins from a different place, exploring how immersive technologies can support Indigenous priorities while strengthening language, culture, and community.

Developed in partnership with and led by Maya Chacaby and Rebecca Caines, Biskaabiiyaang is an Indigenous-governed Virtual Learning Environment grounded in Anishinaabe teachings and guided by OCAP principles. Through digital storytelling and community-centred design, the project creates spaces where Indigenous knowledge, languages, and cultural practices remain at the forefront, demonstrating how technology can be shaped through Indigenous governance and community priorities.

“I think the partnership between Nokiiwin and 91��ɫ around this project should be a model for how educational institutions partner with Indigenous organizations. They’re not extracting from us; they’re working with us to build something meaningful for our communities.”
– Scott Baker, Education Manager, Nokiiwin Tribal Council

Co-creating Intelligent Neuro-Technologies for Healthy Aging (CINTHeA)

As people age, maintaining independence, cognitive health, mobility, and social connection becomes increasingly important. Yet many technologies designed to support older adults don’t fully reflect the everyday realities of aging.

CINTHeA is exploring how intelligent technologies can better support healthy aging by working directly with older adults, caregivers, families, healthcare organizations, and industry partners. Led by James Elder and Vincent DePaul, the project brings together neuroscience, engineering, elder care, and social science to co-create AI-powered tools, including mobile assessment technologies and socially assistive robots, that help identify changes in health while supporting physical, cognitive, and social wellbeing. that respond to physical, cognitive, and social wellbeing. By grounding the research in the experiences and priorities of older adults, CINTHeA is helping shape technologies that support not only longer lives, but healthier, more connected ones.

“We really value having the end users, including older adults, caregivers, families, former care workers, and long-term care staff involved from the beginning. That process of co-creation starts with identifying the problems they feel need to be solved.”
– Vincent DePaul, Co-Principal Investigator of CINTHeA Team Grant

When People Talk, Listen Completely

Workplaces are built around communication. Yet for many Canadians with speech impairments, workplace systems, expectations, and assumptions can create barriers that have little to do with their skills, knowledge, or ability to contribute.

When People Talk, Listen Completely explores how technology and workplace culture can work together to create more equitable employment opportunities. Led by Claire Davies and Shital Desai, the project brings together researchers, employers, clinicians, accessibility advocates, community organizations, and partners including Fable, the Institute for Work & Health, the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work, and SATB2 Connect. Together, they are co-developing AI-enabled communication tools, workplace resources, and inclusive strategies that reflect the experiences of people navigating communication barriers in their everyday and professional lives.

“The decision-making process should be with the individuals so that they can have choice and independence. Understanding how communication happens and then incorporating that understanding into the design of technologies is very important, especially when we are designing technologies to support communication.”
– Shital Desai, Co-Principal Investigator of When People Talk, Listen Completely Team Grant

Each of these projects begins in a different place. A theatre. A community organization. A healthcare setting. A workplace. A language revitalization initiative. Yet all of them arrive at the same understanding: technology is ultimately about people.

Technology will continue to evolve, but the choices we make about how it is developed will shape its impact for generations to come. These projects illustrate that the future of intelligent technologies depends not only on technical discovery, but on bringing together the knowledge, perspectives, and experiences needed to ensure those discoveries truly benefit society. Together, they reflect the vision of Connected Minds, 91��ɫ, and Queen's University to advance research that helps create healthier, more just futures through intelligent technologies.