Who we are
Electric Puppets is a software company that offers a patent pending suite of tools that can be used in medical assessment and research. Our software works on standard Virtual Reality hardware available to consumers. Our initial solution is directed at vision assessment, and we are currently involved in a number of research projects to establish parity between gold standard testing and virtual reality based versions of the same tests. We are actively working with a local children’s hospital to run these research projects and are actively seeking additional projects. We consist of a large ecosystem of experts in diverse domains to achieve our goal of a home based, easy to use medical assessment and research tool using consumer accessible VR hardware. We are a registered Class 1 medical device establishment with Health Canada and based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Our vision is to make medical assessment more precise, more engaging for patients, and accessible from home. We believe strongly that a fun, happy patient experience that takes place in their home or community will ultimately provide better data for treatment, and that VR technology provides a strong potential for realizing that vision.
Our Story
2017
Electric Puppets began when Ryan Cameron, an executive at an animation studio with a 20 year history of developing award winning media and educational platforms along with content, was looking into Virtual Reality as a new medium for entertainment (Hence “Electric Puppets”).
2018
After about a year, and sensing the market couldn’t support the high cost of production for 3d animated content yet, Ryan met with experts at the IWK Children’s hospital to talk about potential of VR in various areas of practice which was met with a lot of enthusiasm. Darren Oystreck and his team at the IWK Children’s Hospital - Pediatric Vision Sciences Group started discussing the potential with Ryan and toured him around their facility. Ryan noted that the tests they were doing appeared to be reproducible in Virtual Reality and proof of concept work on Evrisia began.
2019
Winning an Innovacorp SPARK grant with the help of Oystreck and his associate Steve VanIderstine started Electric Puppets as an Innovacorp incubator company.
At this point Ryan realized that using Virtual Reality, children faced with difficult situations at hospitals could have a better overall experience, and in doing so we can simultaneously provide doctors and researchers with more precise and consistent data.
Jonathan Gallant, Ed and Matt Webber joined to assist with capital acquisition and business management. Along with great enthusiasm, they brought critical experience in both financial management, growth capital, and hospital infrastructure as Ed had founded one of the first companies to put fiber optic networks in the hospitals in Eastern Canada. Jonathan most recently founded Breathing Green Solutions raising millions of dollars to grow a company to a 100 million dollar enterprise and has a lot of experience as an entrepreneur and CPA handling M&A work in the energy sector.
In spite of starting the design as a suite of Vision Assessment tests, most of Ryan’s experience has consisted of creating enterprise level platforms and solutions to solve many problems with one scalable, modular tool. Always finding common ground that could form the basis of a system architecture, he brought this experience to design the Evrisia system for medical research and assessment - given the cross-discipline demand for VR based medical research and assessment. On the advice of Cecilia Basic at the Innovacorp hosted CIPO office down the hall from us, a provisional patent for Evrisia was drawn up and submitted on our behalf by law firm Bereskin & Parr to the USPTO in November of 2019.
2020
Research and projects grew as Electric Puppets and the team at the IWK Children’s Hospital were able receive continued support from Innovacorp and other funding. Eventually after our first Regional Ethics Board approval we applied for and received regulatory approval from Health Canada and now have a patent pending software platform we’re heading to market with as clinical studies are ongoing. As part of our marketing efforts and, thanks to folks at Innovacorp, we’ve joined BioNova and MedTeq to help us find ways to integrate into the Canadian Health Care system, and are in discussions with folks in the US system to help us penetrate that market as well.
The most recent pandemic has proven an interesting opportunity for Electric Puppets as moving clinical assessment and research out of hospitals and into homes where people can self administer and reduce the need for visits to the hospital using VR is a way we can contribute even more to public health. Read more here.
Our entire team, partners, associates and contributors are listed below.
Business and Development:
Ryan Cameron - President & Founder LinkedIN
Jonathan Gallant - Co-Founder & CFO LinkedIN
Matt Webber - Vice President LinkedIN
Ed Webber - Partner
Vision Clinical Advisory Team and Collaborators (IWK Pediatric Vision Science Group and Dalhousie University)
Darren Oystreck - LINK
Dr. G Robert Laroche - LINK
Dr. Francois Tremblay - LINK
Eric Hahn - LINK
Joan Parkinson - LINK
Leah Walsh - LINK
Surgical Simulation Project (Rectus Inc.)
Dr. G Robert Laroche
Dr. David Westwood - LINK
Ashley Whelan - LinkedIN
Psychology and Neuroscience Advisor (Dalhousie University)
Dr. Aaron Newman - LINK
Research and Grant Team (Dalhousie University)
Steve VanIderstine - LinkedIN
Emily Drake - LINK
Quality Management System / Regulatory Compliance
Sandy Morrison - LinkedIN
Ronda Brown - LINK
Partnerships
Electric Puppets is part of Innovacorp’s Incubation program - LINK
Electric Puppets is a member of BioNova - LINK
Electric Puppets is participating in the MedTeq AIM program - LINK
