The team behind H.A.L.O. wins UHN’s inventor of the year award

TORONTO – An interdisciplinary group at UHN that was responsible for creating and launching the patient monitoring innovation called H.A.L.O. (Human Attended Live Observation) has won the hospital’s Mission of Excellence Team Inventor of the Year Award.

H.A.L.O. enables trained staff in a central control room to observe high-risk patients across the hospital – and in other facilities across the country – so they remain safe at all times.

H.A.L.O. launched as a fully operational company in early 2025 and now offers a robust, much-needed virtual care clinical service beyond the UHN family of hospitals, where it has been deployed across 50 inpatient units realizing significant efficiencies and cost savings.

The Team Inventor of Year Award honours:

• H.A.L.O. clinical inventors and co-founders, Dr. Shaf Keshavjee and Marijana Zubrinic.
• TECHNA engineering and software teams, led by Dr. Luke Brzozowski and Jimmy Qiu.
• Altum Health team led by Shiran Isaacksz, Justin Young, Emily Hannon and Lori Seeton.

A category within UHN’s prestigious Mission of Excellence Awards and sponsored by Commercialization at UHN, the Inventor of the Year Award recognizes an individual or team whose invention has made a substantial and noteworthy commercialization contribution leading to A Healthier World.

“These awards honour the dedication, ingenuity and creativity of TeamUHN, celebrating excellence in clinical care, education and research,” said Dr. Kevin Smith, president and CEO of UHN.

The Origins of H.A.L.O. The inspiring commercialization journey of H.A.L.O. began not in a lab or research facility, but directly at the patient’s bedside, thanks to the steadfast vision and dedication of both Marijana Zubrinic, nurse practitioner at UHN’s Toronto General Hospital, and Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, UHN’s former surgeon in chief.

Marijana’s work involved caring for patients awaiting lung transplantation, often with complex respiratory needs and needing constant observation due to high safety risks. After witnessing several preventable serious safety events, Marijana committed herself to inventing and developing a solution to a very real problem facing vulnerable patients.

Across hospital settings, patients experiencing delirium, confusion, or dementia may act impulsively and may engage in behaviours that place their safety at risk, potentially resulting in significant harm. These patients may intentionally or unintentionally remove essential medical equipment – such as oxygen masks – or attempt to get out of bed without assistance, increasing the risk of falls, injury, and other preventable adverse events.

In 2015, recognizing the urgency of this challenge in a particularly vulnerable patient population, Marijana Zubrinic and her colleagues in Toronto General Hospital’s Thoracic Surgery Division began piloting a novel approach to remotely monitor high-risk patients, starting with those awaiting lung transplantation.

“The first attempt was a simple make-shift device consisting of a camera and speaker on an IV pole donated from the OR & Biomedical Department, with monitoring provided by nursing summer students,” explained Zubrinic. “A stable, yet admittedly bored, pre-lung transplant patient was excited at the prospect of being involved in our initial proof of concept. Two days into the experiment, it saved his life.”

Prior to discharge, the patient thanked Zubrinic for involving him in the pilot and asked her to promise to make the invention a standard of care across Canada.

“I made that promise,” explained Zubrinic, “And from there, the project quickly evolved from a good idea into an impactful project that every nurse and physician in the division was deeply vested in, particularly my co-inventor and H.A.L.O. co-founder Dr. Shaf Keshavjee.”