Radar is a technology that uses radio waves to determine the direction and radial velocity of objects relative to their location for detecting and tracking ships, planes, spacecraft, guided missiles and cars, and to map weather formations and terrain. But a brilliant electrical engineer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot has adapted it to monitor multiple patients’ vital signs at a distance in hospitals – and it earned her an Israel Prize on Independence Day 2025.
“It’s an incredibly moving and humbling experience to be part of such a distinguished group of individuals whose contributions are so significant in their respective fields,” Prof. Yonina Eldar said.
The growing list of her collaborators includes doctors from hospitals in both Israel and abroad, including the Rabin Medical Center and Schneider’s Children Medical Center in Petah Tikva, Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Emek Medical Center in Afula, Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and New York University’s Langone Medical Center in New York, and Massachusetts General Hospital.
At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, she asked physicians from all over Israel to join her online in a brainstorming session to identify the most pressing needs of an overloaded healthcare system. “In the midst of the health crisis, I felt frustrated to just be sitting back and not doing enough,” she recalled.
One of the problems they raised was the risk of spreading the infection by touching hospital patients while monitoring their conditions. “Addressing this problem fit in well with my research interests,” Eldar explained. “It had long bothered me that when it comes to technological innovations, the world of health lags far behind areas such as communications or entertainment. For example, we can use cell phones or play computer games hands-free, but in standard practice, a doctor still uses a stethoscope to examine a patient, just like a hundred years ago.”
ELDAR HAD worked with radars since the beginning of her scientific career – including with defense applications and autonomic cars. “Radar devices are small, inexpensive, and convenient, and they emit waves that are safe for humans: They’ve been used, for example, to count the number of people in a room or make sure no baby is left behind in a car. So I thought, why not apply radar to monitor patients remotely?”
She had just joined Weizmann’s Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department, where she launched a lab that develops innovative technologies for processing signals and information in a variety of fields including medicine. She and her team decided to create an entirely new technology for remotely checking up on people’s health by using radar, which was developed secretly for military use by several countries before and during World War II.
A key development was the cavity magnetron in the United Kingdom, which made possible the creation of relatively small systems with sub-meter resolution. The term RADAR was coined in 1940 by the US Navy as an acronym for “radio detection and ranging,” but it quickly changed from being an acronym to being a recognized word.
The use of radar systems in numerous civilian applications
Radar systems are most familiar to us from military uses such as detecting aircraft or ships, but they also have numerous civilian applications, including the vehicle industry. They detect and track objects by emitting electromagnetic waves and interpreting the changes that occur in these waves as they bounce back after hitting the object.
Born 52 years ago in Toronto, she is the third daughter of Rabbi Meyer and Vicky Berglas, who took her and the rest of the family to Israel when she was six years old. She earned her science degrees in physics and electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University (TAU) and today is a member of the prestigious Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
BRAHMS IS the team’s Bio-Radar Health Monitoring System. Designed to continuously monitor a person’s vital signs from a distance, it makes it possible to measure two classic vital signs from afar: heart rate, or pulse, and breathing rate, plus lung function. More parameters could be added in the future, including blood-pressure measurement and breathing pattern analysis, particularly for the detection of sleep apnea in which sleepers stop breathing for seconds without being aware of it.
BRAHMS works by tracking subtle chest movements and interpreting them by means of a sophisticated algorithm her team developed. They have already shown that their system can reliably monitor several people at once, even in noisy, crowded environments. It identifies all the people in the room, measures their vital signs without contact and sends the measurements to a monitor. That monitor can alert medical staff if it detects a change that might signal distress.
The typical maximum range of the radar system proposed by Weizmann researchers for non-contact tracking of vital signs in indoor settings such as homes or hospital rooms – even through clothing or bedding – is nine meters.
Once developed for commercial use, a compact BRAHMS radar could be installed in emergency rooms or intensive care units, or in any other setting that calls for closely monitoring the health of many people simultaneously, the developers suggest – for example, in postoperative care units or homes for the elderly. BRAHMS units could also be used to monitor hospitalized children who are often restless and dislike being hooked up to devices.
The non-contact units would not only reduce the risk of spreading infections – they would eliminate patient discomfort and the hassle of wires getting tangled or pulled off. About two-fifths of intensive care unit patients suffer from skin irritation, dislodged wires or other complications related to bedside monitoring devices, further motivating the move toward non-contact radar sensing.
Eldar said her team succeeded in creating BRAHMS thanks to a systems engineering approach, meaning that they integrated a comprehensive range of design elements, from advanced algorithm development to building the hardware in a way that enabled optimal data extraction. “We combined engineering, mathematics, and physics – to the level of physics equations that describe wave motion and the propagation of information – while setting ourselves the goal of solving a real-life clinical problem,” she explained, “and that’s what made the development possible.”