ASU and Zimin Foundation partner for future of urban tech

August 3, 2020

Cities generate the vibrant energy of society. However, they’re also the center of some of our most pressing sustainability issues — air and water pollution, urban heat islands, disease or security threats, and an increasing demand for resources.

Arizona State University’s four campuses are in the heart of the Phoenix metropolitan area — the fifth-largest city in the United States. The region surrounding ASU faces similar issues to many of the world’s megacities, such as extreme climate and resource limitations. Aware of these challenges, the university has a mission of being socially embedded and leveraging its place to transform society. Researchers in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering and many other schools at ASU are employing an entrepreneurial mindset and applied, use-inspired research to engineer and validate solutions that serve communities. Graphic of smart city technology ideas. Sustainable, smart cities incorporate wide-reaching, interconnected technologies to improve infrastructure, transportation, resource efficiency, health, security and more. The new Zimin Institute for Smart and Sustainable Cities, in partnership with the Zimin Foundation, will help support applied research projects to drive a people-centric vision for the future of cities. Image courtesy of Shutterstock Download Full Image

Sustainable, smart-city technologies represent a unique opportunity to create solutions that advance urban areas and the well-being of their inhabitants by addressing the potentially harmful effects of the built environment.

An opportunity to work with the most innovative university on smart-city technology was the impetus for the Zimin Foundation to partner with and support ASU and the Fulton Schools on the second international Zimin Institute, focusing on future technologies that enable smart and sustainable cities.

“The selection reflects on ASU’s growing reputation as an innovation powerhouse and an agent for positive societal change and impact,” said Kyle Squires, dean of the Fulton Schools.

“With this gift, the new institute has a tremendous opportunity to energize the ASU community of scholars and innovators to lead the creation of new smart-city technology solutions, to catalyze new active collaborations with regional stakeholder public and private partners and ultimately to be a world leader in the smart and sustainable cities arena.”

Zimin Foundation provides resources to advance society through innovation

The Zimin family has historically focused its philanthropic efforts on supporting science and education in Russia. Their not-for-profit organization, the Zimin Foundation, recently extended its activities to other countries, with the first Zimin Institute established at Tel Aviv University in 2018 and now ASU in 2020.

“The Zimin Foundation and ASU share the vision of achieving high impact by supporting projects with visible real-world effects,” said Mark Shmulevich, head of Zimin Institutes at the Zimin Foundation. “ASU will be able to match the experience of their researchers and their research partners with the opportunities to quickly apply sustainability and smart-city innovations.”

The vision of the Zimin Institute for Smart and Sustainable Cities at ASU is to drive people-centric smart cities of the future — integrating advanced technologies into the physical spaces where people live, work, learn and play to enhance security, health, sustainability and resilience.

The first challenge of creating smart, sustainable cities is their wide-ranging, difficult-to-define yet appealing promise, said Gregory Raupp, director of the new Zimin Institute for Smart and Sustainable Cities at ASU and Fulton Schools Foundation Professor of chemical engineering. With so many components and stakeholders, Raupp says “the only logical and effective strategy to address the challenges is through a combination of targeted, use-inspired research leading to technological innovation and collaboration between public organizations and private enterprises.”

“A city, smart or otherwise, is an incredibly complex system of systems of systems,” Raupp said. “We must integrate and weave all of the technology solutions into a cohesive fabric that works seamlessly and effectively to make a genuinely smart city, one that increases the level of health, happiness, contentment and personal enrichment of all its citizens — a place where we would all want to live.”

The new Zimin Institute at ASU will identify transformative technologies, connect researchers for interdisciplinary collaboration, fund nascent technology solutions, leverage ASU and local innovative testbeds and initiatives, grow the smart-cities entrepreneurial ecosystem through venture funding, and engage with the community and stakeholders to ensure solutions coming out of the institute create value.

“The Zimin Institute at ASU will financially support several projects every year on a competitive basis,” Shmulevich said. “It will also allow the project teams to tap into the Zimin Foundation network of researchers, tech experts and laboratories. We believe that interdisciplinary teams of researchers often generate the best innovations. We strongly encourage such collaboration. The most successful projects will be able to tap on the Zimin Foundation support in the later stages of their innovation journey.”

In 2020, projects of interest focus on human connection, sustainable and healthy environments, public safety and well-being, and infrastructure resilience. The Zimin Institute is open to consider supporting compelling new projects that may be considered too risky for conventional funding avenues.

Raupp is pleased with the first four projects that have been selected for support by the Zimin Institute technical advisory and executive advisory boards. They address multiple facets of the future of smart cities, from sustainable building materials, the urban heat island and air quality to support for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and their caregivers. [Read more about the projects on Full Circle.]

“These projects are all tackling immensely important problems that are, unfortunately, growing in their scale and intensity,” Raupp said. “In addition, it is gratifying to see that the projects cement new, exciting collaborations with external organizations.”

The selected projects are at a diverse range of stages from visioning and ideation to technology prototypes and field testing.

“It’s a great start,” said Boris Zimin, chairman of the Zimin Foundation. “Our vision is to be able to support the most promising innovation projects that bring lab findings into the world, helping people globally. We wish the best of luck to the first winners of our grant call at ASU and will keep doing our best supporting them.”

A graphic showing the process to use plastics to create an ingredient for concrete.

Assistant Professor Christian Hoover and Associate Professor Elham Fini are developing a process to use plastics diverted from landfills to create more sustainable concrete. Support for the project will help Hoover and Fini optimize the procedure for treating waste plastic and the amount of plastic particles in concrete mixtures for best performance.

Image courtesy of Christian Hoover and Elham Fini

Three maps showing air quality monitoring networks and the light rail line in the Phoenix metro area.

Assistant Research Professor Samuel Markolf is using a network of sensors on light rail trains to monitor Phoenix air quality for mitigation efforts and improved community health. Funding from the Zimin Institute will help Markolf determine the benefits of low-cost, rapidly deployable sensors to understand local conditions.

Image courtesy of Samuel Markolf

A series of illustrations demonstrates the uses for a storytelling robot in the role of caregiving for older adults who have dementia.

A series of illustrations for the uses for a storytelling robot in the role of caregiving for older adults who have dementia. Assistant Professor Troy McDaniel is testing different human-robot interfaces to help mitigate negative effects of dementia on both people with the condition and their caregivers. Zimin Institute support will allow McDaniel to test different human-robot interfaces.

Image courtesy of Troy McDaniel

A graphic of a bus stop shelter with a reflective surface on the roof that can passively cool the surrounding area.

Professor David J. Sailor and Assistant Professor Ariane Middel are testing an urban cooling surface technology applied on bus stop shelters. They also plan to track heat variations across Phoenix with a sensor network integrated into mass transit infrastructure. Zimin Institute backing for this project will help the research team generate proof-of-concept data from living laboratories.

Image courtesy of David J. Sailor and Ariane Middel

Continuing support for applied research solutions

The Zimin Foundation leaders look forward to what will happen through these projects in the next few years. Foundation representatives will regularly interact with the project researchers and introduce them to their network, enabling the teams to learn and share best practices of translating research into real-world use.

When these four projects reach the prototyping phase or the researchers want to create spinoffs from their research, the Zimin Foundation will consider extending its support.

“We plan to hold three selection cycles and then an in-depth review of the progress of all the supported projects,” Shmulevich said.

Zimin Foundation support is not limited to engineering researchers — faculty members from across ASU can apply for Zimin Institute funding with projects at any stage of development. The institute will prioritize solutions headed toward implementation, deployment or commercialization within five years.

“The Zimin Institute at ASU provides a unique funding opportunity that’s intended to bridge gaps in translating research to commercialization, essentially to fund new, exciting ideas and solutions for which it might otherwise be difficult to secure additional funding, while establishing new, productive collaborations and partnerships,” Raupp said. “Any professor looking for a path to commercialization for their smart-cities research is welcome to apply for funding.”

Faculty members interested in applying for Cohort II funding can visit zimin-institute.asu.edu for more information, or contact Project Manager Lisa Irimata at lirimata@asu.edu or Zimin Institute Director Greg Raupp at raupp@asu.edu for specific questions.

Monique Clement

Lead communications specialist, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

480-727-1958 monique.clement@asu.edu

ASU startup seeks to fill the gaps in home health care

Stock image - Nurse taking a patient's blood pressure

If you want to learn about the challenges in health care, you can ask just about anyone. If you want to learn about ways to solve those challenges, ask a nurse.Jasmine Bhatti is a nurse, a PhD student in Arizona State University’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation and, now, an entrepreneur. Her startup, Navi Concierge Nurses, was born out of a problem her hospital patients kept...

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ASU startup seeks to fill the gaps in home health care

August 3, 2020

If you want to learn about the challenges in health care, you can ask just about anyone. If you want to learn about ways to solve those challenges, ask a nurse.

Jasmine Bhatti is a nurse, a PhD student in Arizona State University’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation and, now, an entrepreneur. Stock image - Nurse taking a patient's blood pressure Download Full Image

Her startup, Navi Concierge Nurses, was born out of a problem her hospital patients kept running into when it was time to be discharged. With the help of the HEALab last fall, it came to life fairly quickly.

“I worked as a teacher’s assistant for ASU 101, and one of the requirements for Edson College students in this course is that they spend a day in the HEALab. That’s when I first learned about everything they did and had to offer for students and anyone at ASU with a health-related idea,” said Bhatti.

After that visit, she reached out to Clinical Professor Rick Hall, director of the HEALab and senior director of health innovation programs at Edson College, to set up a meeting and share what she had in mind for a health care business.

Her idea was to create a marketplace connecting nurses to people in need of medical guidance and support after a hospital stay or outpatient surgery, or for families seeking additional help for aging loved ones. The goal is to fill the gap left when patients don’t qualify for home health care but still need a bit of professional help.

Jasmine Bhatti

“When people are sick and in the hospital, they’re vulnerable. When they’re getting ready to leave they’re being flooded with information and they can’t really absorb it. So by the time they get home, they may have an idea of what they’re supposed to do but then they don’t remember,” she said.

Her time spent with Hall describing this concierge nurse marketplace went really well.

“After one meeting, I knew that her idea behind Navi had significant potential — and she ran with it,” Hall said.

As a result of their meeting, Hall connected Bhatti with a professor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. From there she worked with graduate students and had them build a very simple model of what the technology would look like.

Hall also encouraged her to join Venture Devils, a suggestion that would prove incredibly fruitful in many ways just a few months later.

Navi Concierge Nurses was no longer just an idea in her head, but an actual startup and things moved quickly from there. She brought on two team members, Ayan Said and Shawn Harrell; they had their first paying customers lined up and were preparing their pitch for Venture Devils Demo Day.

Then the coronavirus hit, and their momentum halted as they worked to determine the safest way forward for their nurses and patients. While that was going on, Bhatti — who works at a local hospital caring for COVID-19 patients — said she began seeing another problem.

“What we started to realize with COVID is that people who are discharged from the hospital are having to absorb the home care plan on their own because no visitors are allowed. So if they miss something or they forget what they’ve been told, they’re on their own,” she said.

It became clear Navi Concierge Nurses could help solve that problem for people, once they identified and implemented the necessary precautions to start taking on patients again.

In the meantime, the team was still working on their pitch for Venture Devils Demo Day, which was held virtually this spring. They were excited to pitch and thought it went well.

“It’s the year of the nurse, and it's such a profound time for the spotlight to be on nurses and what it is that we do and why our work is so important. We went into our pitch with the attitude of now is the time when nurses can make an impact on the community and we want to be a part of that,” said Bhatti.

They knocked it out of the park, winning $10,000, one of the largest funding amounts of the event.

Navi Concierge Nurses team celebrates virtually after winning funding during Demo Days

The Navi Concierge Nurses team celebrates on Zoom after learning they won $10,000 in funding during Demo Day.

That was in May. By late June they’d started taking patients again and had competed in another pitch competition, making it to the final four. The momentum was rebuilding, and the business was back on track with plans for a technology component in development.

“Jasmine has two co-founders, an advisory board, funding opportunities, and paying customers. It is even clearer to me today that this idea has the right team to connect talented nurses and nurse practitioners directly to people through technology that is disruptive and needed,” said Hall.

For her part, Bhatti is adamant that none of this would have happened without the resources of the HEALab and the startup community in the Valley. The connections made, the mentors established and the doors that continue to open are because of the solid entrepreneurial environment that has been developed here.

All of those elements and the tremendous support allowed her to focus on the purpose and the mission of Navi Concierge Nurses. Her hope for the future is to provide a meaningful and successful service while showing her fellow nurses that there’s so much more they can do.

“It’s hard because nurses, we’re innovative but we don’t really take credit for things and we don’t often step outside of the box. So we want to show nurses that it’s possible to create the solutions we all talk about and encourage them to not be afraid or to let things hold them back and go after what they want.”