Apple wants to turn AirPods into AI-powered heart rate monitors
What's the story
Apple is looking into the possibility of using artificial intelligence (AI) technology in its existing hardware, like AirPods, for non-invasive heart rate monitoring.
The company's research team recently published a paper exploring the use of AI-powered acoustic models to estimate heart rates from recordings of heart sounds.
These sounds can be captured from the body using devices like AirPods.
Research details
AI models tested for heart rate estimation
The study, "Foundation Model Hidden Representations for Heart Rate Estimation from Auscultation," examines whether foundation AI models trained on general audio and speech can accurately estimate heart rates from heart sounds.
This non-invasive method is similar to how doctors use stethoscopes to listen to heart rates.
The Apple researchers tested six major foundation models, including HuBERT, wav2vec2, and an internally-developed version of Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP), to see how well these could pick-up heartbeats from phonocardiograms (recordings of heart sounds).
Performance comparison
Outperforming traditional methods in heart rate detection
The research showed that these AI models, although not specifically designed for healthcare tasks, outperformed traditional methods based on handcrafted audio features.
The Apple team used a publicly available dataset of over 20 hours of hospital-recorded heart sounds, annotated by medical experts.
They divided the audio clips into five-second segments and let the AI analyze them to predict heart rates in beats per minute (BPM).
Layer analysis
AI models' mid-level layers best for detecting heart signals
The study found that mid-level layers in AI models were best at detecting heart signals, while deeper layers, usually fine-tuned for speech recognition, were less effective at analyzing biological sounds like heartbeats.
This suggests Apple would have to focus on specific parts of these AI models rather than using them as-is for health tracking.
Future prospects
Apple's research hints at future device capabilities
While the research doesn't hint at any commercial product, it does show Apple's intent to do more with its devices.
The company has already shown the expanding possibilities of earbuds like Beats Powerbeats Pro 2, which can offer heart rate tracking.
With AI, Apple wants its wearables to achieve even more.