Tarek El Salti
Biography
Dr. El Salti holds a BSc (2002), MCompSc (2007) and PhD (2012) in Computer Science. He joined Sheridan in 2013 and joined the Centre for Applied AI (formerly known as the Centre for Mobile Innovation) in 2017.
Dr. El Salti has directly trained and supported more than 20 students at Sheridan College in his research roles in the past five years (19 undergraduate students, 6 students from diploma programs). All the research projects undertaken by Dr. El Salti realized significant opportunities with regard to training students, professors, staff and industrial partners (PCC, TELUS, and Tech4Life).
Dr. El Salti's research areas focus on mHealth and indoor localizations. Honours/awards include, among others:
- Recognition and Appreciation, Sheridan Creates 2022, with the presentation, "Novel, Low-Cost COVID-19 Point of Care Monitoring and Triaging Device."
- Nominated for Sheridan’s People Award 2021.
- Recognition and Appreciation, Session Chair for IEEE IEMCON 2021, Vancouver, Canada, October 2021.
- Minister’s Award of Excellence 2020, Ministry of Colleges and Universities, Government of Ontario.
Contributions to research
1. I was the PI and lead Researcher on the project entitled: Designing a Heterogeneous Indoor Location Services Framework. Our goal was to improve upon the existing methods of high-resolution location awareness. We achieved this goal through two levels of investigation. First, we focused on the strategies to develop a framework for improving the reliability and resolution of heterogeneous micro location services. Second, we investigated and proposed strategies, through proof-of-concept prototypes, for the development of indoor context-aware mobile applications in order to improve the life experience of modern users in public and private indoor environments. In particular, an Indoor Location Service (ILS) framework was constructed based on a set of technologies and methodologies (e.g., Wi-Fi technology based on Received Signal Strength Indicator [RSSI]).
2. I was the Principal Investigator (PI) and lead Researcher on the project entitled: Novel, Low-Cost Covid-19 Point of Care Diagnosis Devices. The overall goal of this proposal was to rapidly manufacture low-cost (~$150) Point of Care (PoC) system to reach thousands of Canadians that are really in need of assessment and monitoring, to reduce the impact of COVID-19 and to save future Canadians’ lives. We developed a low-cost, ready-to-use and reliable COVID-19 PoC self-assessment and monitoring device by capitalizing on the existing Tech4Life mHealth solutions, underpinned by the current successful collaboration with Sheridan College and the capability of swift mobilization of resources. At the end of this project, the prototype was fully functional, and it was considered an actual product. The product focused on measuring the temperature of the forehead via IR and the oxygen level in the blood. The product can be further developed in the future to include more sensors to capture more use cases. The company will market the product and apply for approvals from Health Canada.
3. I was the PI on the project entitled: NewPneu: A cost-effective solution for detecting childhood pneumonia in low-resource communities. We designed and implemented a new low cost and real time mHealth system called NewPneu. The new hub design is the critical part among the system components. As part of the validation process, the new design demonstrated that it was highly accurate based on the strong linear relationship between the measured and applied frequencies. From our real life experiments conducted on participants, NewPneu further demonstrated that it was significantly accurate based on the following findings: 1) the confidence intervals between NewPneu and a gold standard device (i.e., CMS7000PLUS) were similar in terms of the collected biometric ˘data (i.e., SpO2 and Respiration Rate (RR)), 2) there were no significant differences between the two methods of measurements in terms of the means of the same biometric data, 3) there were significant correlations between NewPneu and the gold standard device in terms of the different biometric data, and 4) the two methods of measurements were within the limits of agreements. Moreover, the lifetime of our newly designed hub lasted for a significant amount of time compared to that for a commercial hub. Therefore, NewPneu is considered energy efficient system. Lastly, the new system is cost effective solution (~$10). Based on all these properties, NewPneu is considered reliable for the community-based health workers to monitor key signs of pneumonia in children in low resource settings
Selected publications
T. El Salti, E. R. Sykes, J. Nievas and C. Tong, A New Low-Cost and Accurate Diagnostic mHealth System for Patients with COVID-19 Pneumonia, IEEE International Conference on Digital Health (ICDH), July 2022, pp. 123-128, doi: 10.1109/ICDH55609.2022.00027.
El Salti, T., Shaw, N., Cheung, C-C., and Sykes, E. R., New and Reliable Points Shifting - Based Algorithm for Indoor Location Services1, The International Journal of Ubiquitous Systems and Pervasive Networks (JUSPN), volume 17, Issue 2, December 2022, pp. 51 – 58, Published: 07 Dec 2022, doi: 10.5383/JUSPN.17.02.001.
Shaw, N., El Salti, T., Cheung, C-C., and Sykes, E. R., (2021). A New Set of Wi-Fi Dynamic Line-Based Localization Algorithms for Indoor Environment. Procedia Computer Science, Vol 191, 2021, pp.76-84, doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2021.07.013.
El Salti, T., Edward R. Sykes, Warren Zajac, Saad Abdullah, and Shariq Khoja, NewPneu: A Novel Cost Effective mHealth System for Diagnosing Childhood Pneumonia in Low-Resource Settings, the 10th IEEE Annual Information Technology, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (IEMCON), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, October 2019,
Tarek El Salti, Mark Orlando, Simon Hood, Gerhard Knelsen, Melanie Iarocci, Zachary Lazzara, Yongmei Xie, Joseph Chun-Chung Cheung, and Isaac Woungang, A New Set of Bluetooth Based Fingerprinting Algorithms for Indoor Location Services. Paper presented at the 9th IEEE Annual Information Technology, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (IEMCON 2018), British Columbia, Canada. [Best Paper Award]
Conference Papers/Posters:
Tarek El Salti, Deborah Stacey, Nidal Nasser and Fadi Turjman. Packet Delivery Significance in Protocols for Three Dimensional Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks, the 10th IEEE International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), August 2014.
Lutful Karim, Nidal Nasser, and Tarek El Salti. Routing on Mini-Gabriel Graphs in Wireless Sensor Networks, the IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), Shanghai, China, October 2011, pages 105–110.
Lutful Karim, Nidal Nasser, and Tarek El Salti. Efficient Zone-based Routing Protocol of Sensor Network in Agriculture Monitoring Systems, the IEEE International Conference on Communications and Information Technology – ICCIT 2011, Aqaba, Jordan, March 2011, pages 167–170.
Lutful Karim, Nidal Nasser, and Tarek El Salti. RELMA: A range free localization approach using mobile anchor node for wireless sensor networks, the IEEE International Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Miami, Florida, USA, Dec. 2010, pages 1–5.
Tarek El Salti, Nidal Nasser, and Anwar Al-Yatama. Timely-efficient and reliable topologies for 3D sensor networks. The IEEE International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), Riccione, Italy, June 2010, pages 449–455.
Tarek El Salti, Nidal Nasser, Tarik Talib, and Anwar Al-Yatama. Enhanced topological graphs for 2D sensor networks. The IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010, pages 1–6.
Tarek El Salti, Nidal Nasser and Tarik Talib. A set of topological graphs for 2-D sensor ad hoc networks. The IEEE ICC, Dresden, Germany, 2009, pages 189–194.
Tarek El Salti and Nidal Nasser. Efficient topologies for ocean studies. The ACM International Workshop on UnderWater Networks (WUWNet), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2008 (poster).