- Apple has several teams working on monitoring the health of AirPods
- Heart rate tracking is already approaching the accuracy of the Apple Watch
- Most features may not be ready for AirPods Pro 3
If you thought Apple’s AirPods business was pretty good (it made more money than all of Nintendo last year on its headphones and earphones alone), then you haven’t seen anything yet: Apple is reportedly pushing the best AirPods even further in the healthcare business, a business that Morgan Stanley says could be worth more than $313 billion to Apple by 2027.
The latest report, from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, says that Apple has several teams working on bringing multiple forms of Apple Watch-style health tracking to its headphones, and the next big one could come with the AirPods Pro 3.
Why your ears could be good for your health
Apple has already brought its AirPods to the health market with the addition of hearing aid features to the AirPods Pro 2. But their potential is not limited to audio. It turns out that those little buttons in your ears are also well placed to monitor your heart rate, body temperature, and other vital signs.
According to Bloomberg, the technology isn’t there yet (the biggest progress so far has been in heart rate tracking, but the accuracy isn’t on par with the Apple Watch), but Apple is very interested in turning its headphones in health devices, as well as music and voice.
Apple isn’t the first company to think of this, of course. We covered many of the contenders for health tracking headphones several years ago; For example, the Amazfit Powerbuds Pro were sold with health tracking features in 2021, but, as we found in our tests, the heart rate results were consistently incorrect. That said, Amazfit doesn’t exactly have Apple’s R&D budget or teams of experts; If any company 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 cause reduced blood flow to the hands and fingers, which affects the accuracy of smart watches and devices like the Oura smart ring. Darkness of the ear canal also helps, as which means there is no “Ambient light interferes with the LED light that reflects off the skin and is detected by the optical heart rate sensor.”
Cat continues: “Your ears are also supplied by the same artery as your brain, resulting in constant blood flow and a strong signal for the sensor to detect. Data from a headset is also likely to contain less noise.” ‘than that.’
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 also smart headphones. Apple already offers the first and we know that it is 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 them? Maybe not for most people, but perhaps Apple is betting on the same question it has created for the best Apple Watches compared to other smartwatches: if AirPods could detect heart problems and dangerous falls and who knows what else… would you get angry? No to buy them?
