Welcome to the web pages of the Canadian HIC!

Our team of volunteers at the HIC is always working on as many projects as we can handle. The following are project highlights of our current activities:

Student Design Competition, 2010-2011

We are proud to welcome Canadian students to first HIC humanitarian student design competition. The competition is open to undergraduate and master students enrolled in a Canadian college or university. Basic knowledge in Electronics is desirable and recommended but not required to participate, but knowledge of power electronics or medical equipment will be an asset.

The spirit of this competition is to provide a venue for students to gain practical experience in improving or innovating on an existing design under some of the constrains and conditions they will face in industry. An abstract of the winner’s work will be published in one of the IEEE publications. Prizes will be awarded as follows: first prize, CND $1000; second prize, CND $700; third prize, CND $300. For more details on the student design competition, visit the competition’s web page:

Student Design Competition 2010-2011

Open Hardware Licensing for Humanitarian Projects

We are interested in understanding how to license hardware, electrical and mechanical, contributed to humanitarian projects so that the community at large can maximize its benefits. We’d like to be able to suggest a legal framework under which copyrights, trademarks, patents, and any other required legal elements, all play together harmoniously to facilitate, rather than to hamper, the development of new humanitarian projects and the evolution of existent ones.

This is work in progress and we would really like to speed up on this front. Do you know something about this topic? Would you like to learn about it and contribute to its understanding? We’d like to hear about you! Please contact us.

The IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge

The IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge is in the final year; this three year partnership between the IEEE and the United Nations Foundation was the first time that a major humanitarian organization and a major technology association formed an up-front, collaborative relationship. We are fortunate in that the Data Connectivity and the Reliable Electricity groups are particularly active in Canada, and we at the HIC, to the extent of our volunteering efforts, are happy to collaborate. Please see our Initiatives tab above for more details.