Apple is exploring the possibility of analyzing heartbeat through sound in AirPods

Apple has published a new study describing how artificial intelligence models developed for speech recognition could be used to detect heart rate. These technologies could potentially be integrated into AirPods earbuds.

AI models learn to “listen” to the heart

In a study titled «Foundation Model Hidden Representations for Heart Rate Estimation from Auscultation» Apple showed how basic models designed for audio processing can analyze phonocardiograms – recordings of heart sounds – and determine heart rate. Six popular models were used for the tests, including Whisper (an audio transcription model), as well as Apple’s own CLAP (Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining) model.

Apple tested the models’ performance on 20 hours of public data from the CirCor DigiScope Phonocardiogram set. The audio files, annotated by experts to identify heart murmurs, were split into five-second slices in one-second increments, yielding more than 23,000 recordings for analysis.

Apple’s data was then analyzed in five-second chunks, yielding more than 23,000 recordings for analysis.

The results showed that Apple’s CLAP model outperformed other solutions. According to the researchers, training the model on a variety of audio data, not just speech, improved its ability to pick out features characteristic of heart sounds. While the Whisper, wav2vec2 and wavLM models showed lower accuracy, CLAP demonstrated the lowest mean average error (MAE) across all test data.

AirPods as a health monitoring device

Although Apple has yet to directly announce commercial applications for the technology, the study points to promising use scenarios. Specifically, AI models could be used to analyze pathological changes in cardiopulmonary sounds, such as arrhythmias and heart murmurs.

AirPods could be used to analyze pathological changes in cardiopulmonary sounds, such as arrhythmias and heart murmurs.

In the future, similar features could be integrated into AirPods, given Apple’s interest in user health. For example, the AirPods Pro 2 already support hearing monitoring and noise cancellation features. The company is rumored to be considering equipping the earbuds with sensors to measure heart rate and temperature, and using built-in microphones to collect the necessary data.

The Apple is exploring the possibility of analyzing heartbeat through sound in AirPods was first published on ITZine.ru.