What seemed science fiction is getting closer to becoming a palpable reality. Apple has published a new study that reveals the hidden potential of the Airpods, which could become Smart cardiac monitorscapable of detecting your heart rate using artificial intelligence. In this article we tell you how Cupertino engineers plan to carry this, but we anticipate it: it is a pass.
Yes, the same headphones you use to listen to music or attend calls could, in the not too distant future, help you Prevent cardiovascular diseases. And it is not just a rumor, but Apple itself is investigating with advanced artificial intelligence models and real medical data to bring airpods to another level.
Airpods will take care of your heart
The study, conducted by the Apple research team, analyzes whether it is possible to estimate the heart rate from Heart sound recordings (known phonocardiograms) using AI models, originally trained to interpret audio and language. Despite not being created for medical purposes, the results were surprisingly promising, since they not only worked well, but Apple's own model, an adapted version of Clap (contrastive languge-Audio Pretraining), surpassed the rest in precision.
For the test, the researchers used a public data set composed of more than 20 hours of real sounds of the heart recorded in hospitals and noted by experts. Apple divided those recordings into five -second fragments and trained a neuronal network to estimate the heart rate in beats per minute. The result was a system capable of interpreting biological signals through sound, with comparable, and even superior precision, to that of traditional methods based on manual algorithms.
One of the most curious findings in the study is that larger models do not always offer better results. In fact, the deepest layers, which are usually the most intelligent in language models, turned out to be less useful in the detection of heart signals. Instead, intermediate or superficial layers worked better. This observation is key, because Apple engineers indicate in which parts of the model they should set to extract useful medical information in future applications.
In addition, combining these AI techniques with classic signal processing methods seems to be the key to success. When one failed, the other compensated. Thus they achieved more reliable estimatesopening the door to new possibilities to detect not only heart rate, but also other physiological parameters.
Although the study does not speak of the arrival of any immediate product, nor does it make clinical statements, it suggests the future of Apple devices. If we take into account that airpods already have internal microphones capable of capturing the sound of your own body, the idea of converting them into Medical devices It makes sense. In fact, have you ever heard the heartbeat by putting the airpods?
Apple is laying the foundations for a revolution in digital health. If the company decides to take this technology to the consumer, we could be facing a new era in which your headphones not only accompany you in your day to day, but also take care of your heart, literally. Because at this step, you will not only listen to your Airpods, but you could also save your life when taking them.
