- Apple has multiple teams working on AirPods health monitoring
- Heart-rate tracking is already close to Apple Watch accuracy
- Most features may not be ready for AirPods Pro 3
If you thought Apple’s AirPods business was pretty sweet – last year it made more money than all of Nintendo from its headphones and earbuds alone – then you ain’t seen nothing yet: Apple is reportedly pushing the best AirPods further into the healthcare business, a business that Morgan Stanley claims could be worth over $313 billion to Apple by 2027.
The latest report, from Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, says that Apple has multiple teams working on bringing multiple forms of Apple Watch-style health tracking to its earbuds, and the next big one could arrive with the AirPods Pro 3.
Why your ears could be good for your health
Apple has already taken its AirPods into the healthcare market with the addition of hearing aid features in the AirPods Pro 2. But their potential isn’t limited to audio. Those little buds in your ears, it turns out, are also well placed to monitor your heart rate, your body temperature and other vitals.
According to Bloomberg, the tech isn’t quite there yet – the most progress so far has been on heart-rate tracking, but the accuracy isn’t quite up there with the Apple Watch – but Apple is very keen to make your buds into health devices as well as music and speech ones.
Apple isn’t the first firm to think of this, of course. We covered a lot of the contenders for health-tracking earbuds several years ago; for example, the Amazfit Powerbuds Pro were sold on the basis of health tracking features back in 2021, 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 any firm can get the tech right, it’s likely to be Apple.
And there are some good reasons to put your health tracker in your ear. As our very own Cat Ellis wrote back in 2021, in some circumstances your ear’s a better place for a tracker than your wrist. “For example, working out 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 helps as well, as it means there’s no ambient light to interfere with the LED light being reflected back from your skin and detected by the optical heart rate sensor.”
Cat continues: “Your ears are supplied by the same artery as your brain too, which results in a 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 too. 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 persuade you to upgrade? Maybe not for most people, but perhaps Apple is banking on the same question it’s created for the best Apple Watches compared to other smart watches: if the AirPods could detect heart problems and dangerous falls and who knows what else… would you be mad not to buy them?