When Apple announced new features for the AirPods Pro 2 at the company’s iPhone 16 event in September, the biggest reveal was their ability to work as a set of hearing aids. Now, it looks like Apple is going full throttle on transforming the AirPods into a handy health accessory.
That’s because a newly granted patent has revealed that Apple is working on enabling future AirPods devices to detect certain heart pathologies that you might be suffering from, including an abnormal heartbeat, bradycardia or tachycardia. This could perhaps work as a sort of ‘early warning system’ to alert you to heart issues that you might not be aware of. When armed with that knowledge, you could then visit a doctor for a proper diagnosis.
According to the patent, Apple is considering building small, sensitive microphones into the AirPods. The signal picked up by this microphone would be analyzed by the AirPods and used to determine your heart activity. If any of this activity appears to be unusual or problematic, you might receive an alert or notification about the problem. All this analysis would be carried out by some complex algorithms that may make use of machine learning to decide what exactly it is that the microphones have picked up.
This system might not be limited to just one microphone. In one instance, the patent explains that a second microphone could be installed in the AirPods, with the signal picked up by this second mic compared to that detected by the first microphone and used to determine if you are experiencing unusual heart activity.
Rumors have been doing the rounds for a while now that Apple is planning on incorporating health features into its AirPods, including temperature sensing capabilities and ambient light sensors to pick up on your heart activity. This latest patent suggests the idea that Apple wants to boost the AirPods’ health chops is not entirely without foundation.
In recent years, Apple has been adding more and more health features to its devices. Aside from the recent transformation of the AirPods Pro into a set of hearing aids, the Apple Watch has undergone its own transition from a luxury timepiece (when it originally launched) to a health and fitness accessory that can do anything from sensing atrial fibrillation to tracking your workouts.
All that said, this is just a patent, so it could be that Apple is simply experimenting with different ideas and does not actually implement this concept in a set of AirPods. But at the very least it suggests that Apple is interested in this sort of technology, and in how it can add more health features into the AirPods. And we may well see this idea put into practice in a few years’ time – watch this space.
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