Listen to Your Heart

One of the biggest barriers to adoption for wearable electronic devices is that people do not actually want to wear them. Sticky patches and the like are just not very desirable because of their appearance, or the discomfort that they can cause. And that is a shame — wearable devices have a tremendous amount of potential, especially when it comes to tracking health data. By collecting data continuously, they are able to give healthcare providers a glimpse of their patients’ health that has never been available before.

This situation has sparked a lot of interest in the earables category of wearables. Millions of people are accustomed to wearing earbuds on a daily basis. Comfort is not an issue, nor is the appearance of the devices, so if advanced sensing capabilities could be built into earbuds, they might offer a very promising platform for data collection. And that is exactly what a team of researchers at Bell Labs Cambridge Lab has accomplished. They have developed specially-instrumented earbuds called OmniBuds that are capable of measuring all five vital signs. Just pop the earbuds in and off you go.

OmniBuds come equipped with a set of three microphones, a 9-axis inertial measurement unit, a three-wavelength photoplethysmography sensor, and a skin temperature sensor. This instrumentation is sufficient to capture all five vital signs from the wearer. Speakers allow the device to play audio, just like a standard pair of earbuds. Interestingly, the earbuds also feature an AI hardware accelerator and 2 GB of storage so that cutting-edge analyses can be performed on-device to protect the user’s privacy. And when results need to be reported to the user’s physician, it can be done wirelessly via Bluetooth.

The wireless connection also allows the earbuds to communicate with a companion smartphone app, which enables users to keep tabs on their own health. The developers note that the AI-native programmable operating system that powers the device allows for customization, so the potential range of use cases for the earbuds may grow over time. It has already been demonstrated that wearers can track factors like physical activity and changes in their emotions.

Whew! That is a lot to pack into such a tiny package. By the looks of things, earables may become the tech enthusiast’s best friend in the near future.