Israel Prize laureate, Prof. Yunina Eldar, introduces the radar to the clinic. "Radars are small, inexpensive, and emit waves that are not dangerous to humans. Why don't we use them to monitor patients remotely?"
At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Prof. Yunina Elder With an unusual call to action. She invited doctors across the country to join her for a Zoom brainstorming session to identify the most urgent needs of the overburdened health system. “I felt frustrated that in the midst of a health crisis, we were standing by and doing nothing,” she recalls.
One of the issues that the doctors raised in that brainstorming session was their fear of spreading the disease through contact with hospitalized patients. "This fear was very relevant to the goals of my research," says Prof. Eldar. "It has long bothered me that when it comes to technological innovations, the world of healthcare has lagged behind fields like communications or entertainment. We have long been able to talk on the phone or play on the computer with people in remote places without the need for human contact, but the standard in medicine is still a manual examination using a stethoscope, like a century ago."
Prof. Eldar had just joined the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science's Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and had established a laboratory that develops new technologies for signal and information processing in many fields, including medicine. Together with her research group, she decided to develop a way to monitor people's health remotely using a completely new technology in this arena: radar.
Radar systems are familiar to us mainly from military uses such as identifying aircraft or ships, but they also have many civilian uses, for example in the automotive world. These systems detect and track objects by transmitting electromagnetic waves and decoding the changes that occur in these waves after they hit the subject. Prof. Eldar has worked with radar systems since the beginning of her scientific career, for example in developing defense measures or in applications for autonomous cars. She explains: "Radars are small, inexpensive and easy to use, and they emit waves that are not dangerous to humans. They can be used, for example, to count the number of people in a room or to make sure that a baby has not been left in the car. So I thought: Why don't we use radar to monitor patients remotely?"
Remote monitoring system for vital medical signs
About five years later, her lab introduces BRAHMS, an acronym for Bio-Radar Health Monitoring System – a system designed for continuous remote monitoring of vital medical signs. The system that has been developed already allows for remote measurement of two classic vital signs: heart rate (pulse) and respiratory rate. In addition, it can assess lung function, thereby assisting in the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory disorders. In the future, additional indicators will likely be added, including blood pressure and monitoring of breathing patterns, especially for detecting sleep apnea.
BRAHMS tracks tiny chest movements and interprets them using a sophisticated algorithm developed by Prof. Eldar's group. The scientists have already shown that the system can monitor several people at the same time, even in a busy and noisy environment. It identifies the people in the room, measures their vital signs without contact, and sends the measurements to a computer monitor. If any distress is detected in the room, the system can alert the treating team.
When developed for commercial use, BRAHMS could be installed in emergency rooms or intensive care units, or in any space where multiple people need to be monitored simultaneously, such as nursing homes or post-surgery recovery rooms. Prof. Eldar and her colleagues are also targeting BRAHMS for monitoring hospitalized children, who are often restless and do not like being connected to devices. Non-contact monitoring would not only reduce the risk of disease transmission, it would also eliminate patient discomfort and the hassle of dealing with connections that could become tangled or disconnected. Approximately 40% of patients in intensive care units currently experience skin irritation, disconnections, or other complications related to monitoring devices.
Systems Engineering
Prof. Eldar explains that her research group developed BRAHMS using systems engineering, that is, an approach that combines a wide range of design – from developing an advanced algorithm to building hardware that enables optimal data collection. “We combined engineering, mathematics and physics – down to the level of physical formulas that describe the movement of waves and the transmission of information in signals – and set ourselves the task of solving a real clinical problem, and that is what made the development possible,” she says.
The development group included researchers and engineers from diverse backgrounds. The research was led by doctoral student Jonathan Ader and also included Luda Nisnevich, an algorithm development expert, engineers Shlomi Sbraigo and Moshe Nemer, and the laboratory's clinical director, Dr. Adi Wegerhoff.
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