From research prototype to public tool
Most research-built products never leave the lab. They get validated in a small study, written up in a paper, and quietly retired. Sodium Navigator was built to avoid that fate.
Ontario Tech University’s Heart Health and Nutrition Lab, led by Dr. JoAnne Arcand, had developed something unusually good: a mobile app that translated peer-reviewed nutrition science — how to read a label, lower sodium, build eating habits that hold — into an interactive, dietitian-reviewed experience for people living with heart failure.
And it tested well. In a user-testing study later published in BMC Nutrition, heart-failure patients who used the prototype responded clearly: 90% enjoyed using it, 80% found the information meaningful for their health, and 70% found it easy to use.
But it had reached the ceiling research usually reaches — a validated prototype, serving the population it was designed for, and going no further. A funding partnership with ManuLife opened a far larger door: bring this work to the general public. That meant a new audience, a new platform, and a new set of constraints.
Three problems, at once
Re-aim the content. A heart-failure patient arrives already told by a cardiologist to cut sodium. The general public mostly hasn’t thought about sodium at all. We reframed the opening module from “sodium and heart failure” to “sodium and health,” removed the clinical body-map interaction that only made sense for symptomatic patients, and replaced it with prevention-focused, myth-busting content designed to engage someone who never considered salt a problem — and to do it better than the static government health pages it would sit alongside.
Rebuild for the web — without losing what made it good. The original was a mobile app behind an app-store install. The public version needed to be a web app: open a link, start learning. We rebuilt it in Unity/WebGL, preserving the interactive, gamified experience rather than flattening it into another page of text.
Engineer around the budget — not around the user. A research grant is not a software budget. The obvious way to let users save progress and return later is cloud infrastructure — and a recurring monthly cost the lab would carry indefinitely. Instead, we engineered local, browser-based persistence: the same “pick up where you left off” experience, with no ongoing cloud bill. The architecture was still built so the lab could move to the cloud later if funding allowed — we just didn’t spend money that didn’t need spending.
Around that, we built the product out: a SMART goal-setting module, a Goal Creator that coaches a user from a vague intention to a specific, realistic goal, a Goal Tracker, a multi-profile system for research use, and integration of the lab’s Sodium Calculator screening tool. The engagement ran on a weekly cadence — recorded recaps, async feedback, consistent on-timeline delivery — so a busy academic team stayed in control of the work without it consuming them.
The outcome
The public, web-based Sodium Navigator launched in 2025, hosted by Ontario Tech University and available to Canadians broadly — a free, interactive tool for understanding and reducing sodium intake.
What began as a research prototype for one clinical population is now a public health resource, with the underlying work peer-reviewed and the project continuing under Dr. Arcand’s lab.
That path — from funded study, to validated prototype, to a product the public can actually use — is the hardest part of research commercialization. It’s also the entire point of it. And it’s the work Peppermint Labs exists to do — a digital health and research commercialization consultancy based in Toronto, partnering with university labs and clinical researchers across Canada.