- Apple has multiple teams working on AirPods health monitoring
- Heart rate measurement is already close to the accuracy of Apple Watch
- Most features may not be ready for AirPods Pro 3
If you thought Apple’s AirPods business was pretty good – last year It made more money than all of Nintendo on its headphones and earbuds alone — then you ain’t seen nothing yet: Apple is reportedly pushing its best AirPods further into healthcare, a business that Morgan Stanley claims could be worth more than $313 billion to Apple by 2027.
The latest report, from BloombergApple’s Mark Gurman says multiple teams at Apple are working to bring multiple forms of Apple Watch-style health tracking to the earbuds, and the next big one could come with the AirPods Pro 3.
Why your ears can be good for your health
Apple has already introduced its AirPods to the healthcare market with the addition of hearing aid features to the AirPods Pro 2. But their potential isn’t limited to audio. Those little buttons in your ears also appear to be well-placed to monitor your heart rate, body temperature and other vital functions.
According to Bloomberg, the technology isn’t quite there yet – most of the progress so far has been in heart rate tracking, but the accuracy isn’t quite at the same level as the Apple Watch – but Apple is very keen to your buttons and health devices, but also music and speech devices.
Apple is of course not the first company to think of this. We covered many of the candidates for health tracking earbuds several years ago; For example, the Amazfit Powerbuds Pro were sold in 2021 based on health tracking features, but as we found in our tests, the heart rate results were consistently wrong. That said, Amazfit doesn’t exactly have Apple’s R&D budget or teams of experts; If there’s one company that can get the technology right, it’s probably Apple.
And there are some good reasons to put your health tracker in your ear. As our own Cat Ellis wrote in 2021, in some circumstances your ear is a better place for a tracker than your wrist. “For example, exercising in cold weather can result in reduced blood flow to your hands and fingers, which affects the accuracy of smartwatches and devices like the Oura smart ring. The darkness of your ear canal also helps, as it means no ambient light interferes with the LED light reflected by your skin and detected by the optical heart rate sensor.”
Cat continues: “Your ears are also supplied by the same artery as your brain, resulting in consistent blood flow and a strong signal for the sensor to detect. The data from an earbud is also likely to contain less ‘noise’ than that from a watch or ring”.
The most likely scenario for health tracking in the future is to have a range of devices for different types of people and different use cases: smart watches, smart rings, and soon, smart earbuds. Apple already offers the first, and we know it’s at least experimenting with the second and third.
If you already have a pair of the fantastic AirPods Pro 2, would the addition of health sensors convince you to upgrade? Maybe not for most people, but maybe Apple is banking on the same question that’s been asked for the best Apple Watches compared to other smartwatches: if the AirPods could detect heart problems and dangerous falls and who knows what else… would you be angry? not to buy them?