AirPods 3 (Photo: Walla! Technology, Yanon Ben Shoshan)
Just this week we reported here that Apple is entering the health business strongly with a sensor that measures blood sugar without the need for a needle, and now there are rumors that its popular AirPods are about to become a hearing device.
Mark Gorman, Bloomberg's technology reporter claims in his weekly newsletter that AirPods in the coming years will receive features that will make them devices that compensate for hearing impairments.
Gorman has a long-standing reputation in the industry as someone who has good sources at Apple, so his words carry weight.
Apple already has several features focused on improving hearing in AirPods, such as live listening or amplifying a conversation.
However, Gorman points out that these features have not yet been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as a recognized hearing aid.
At the same time, with Apple's visible ambitions regarding its intentions to enter the field of health technology in full force, he predicts that they will also be officially approved as a hearing aid.
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Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has previously noted that Apple has intentions of introducing biometric measurement capabilities into its headphones.
Patent applications filed by the Cupertino-based company describe a headphone-based monitoring system that incorporates a biometric sensor that sits inside the ear, which can monitor temperature, heart rate, breathing, and more through skin contact and other sensors.
Kevin Lynch, Apple's VP of technology, also hinted that the headphones may be a means of health monitoring in the future. We will only note that heart rate measurement through headphones in itself is nothing new - Intel has already introduced such headphones in collaboration with the Fifty Cent headphone company about a decade ago
. Just to finish because it is possible that some of the features of the hearing aids in general will be based on software processing, and will also be pushed to existing AirPods through an update to the headphone firmware.
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