Apple’s AirPods have become one of the most popular wireless headphones on the market, with their sleek design, ease of use and simple connectivity with all Apple devices. In addition to their popularity in technology and even fashion, AirPods also have great potential in the health and wellness field.
That’s just what a new leak tells us, and that is that with the upcoming addition of new biometric and hearing health monitoring features, AirPods could become an integral tool for tracking and improving our health.
First it was the Apple Watch, then the AirPods
AirPods could include more hearing health-related features, Mark Gurman reports in his latest newsletter. Apple reportedly has plans to “update the AirPods to become a health tool in the next year or two”, adding “the ability to get some sort of auditory data”.
The truth is that we already see how Apple has incorporated some functions focused on hearing health in the AirPods. Examples of these are live listening, which allows us to use the iPhone to transmit sound more loudly and clearly to the AirPods, or Conversation Boost, which amplifies voices in a conversation to make it easier for people with some hearing difficulty to understand them. These functions, however, do not have FDA approval and are not designed to replace conventional hearing aids.
And this is just one point where Apple’s strategy may be refocused. According to Gurman, Apple could consider these functions “more officially”, while adding others. In fact, recall that analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, has already mentioned on a few occasions that the company has plans to add biometric monitoring capabilities to future models of the AirPods.
Initially, we thought we might be talking about a complement to the metrics already collected by the Apple Watch, such as heart rate or movement, but it seems that we could go further. In fact, through patents, Apple has told us about measurements of body temperature and perspiration levels.
Tim Cook has already commented on more than one occasion that Apple’s biggest contribution in the long term will be in the field of health. The Apple Watch is already going in this direction, but the AirPods, as another wearable device, is another excellent candidate for further progress in this field. Kevin Lynch himself, Apple’s vice president of technology, has also hinted in the past that the AirPods could become a source of additional health data in the future.
New developments that may come from the software side
It is important to note that the new hearing health capabilities will not necessarily depend on the release of new models of the AirPods, as the current models already have speakers and microphones that can support these features. Something we have seen with the new optimized transparency mode of the AirPods Pro 2, for example, and which can serve as a basis for other functionalities.
Thus, given sufficient processing power and assuming that the hardware in terms of microphones and speakers is already sufficient, these capabilities could come to existing AirPods via a firmware update.
The addition of health features to AirPods is an important initiative. One that seeks to make the products we already know and enjoy into wellness and health tools. Tracking hearing health, without going any further, could be particularly relevant, as it is estimated that around 15% of adults have some form of hearing loss.
AirPods that, like the Apple Watch, which already saves lives and goes beyond being a watch (for example with the challenge for International Women’s Day), will allow us to become aware of certain habits or situations to remedy them in time, are undoubtedly excellent news. Devices that could help identify hearing problems in time and prevent the situation from worsening. With health monitoring technology constantly evolving, the possibilities that AirPods can offer in the near future are many and varied.
