Early this year, Beats released its most anticipated Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds. With several new improvements, these are among the best earbuds available. One of the standout features is the ability to measure heart rate during workouts, which is a first for Apple earbuds.
While the current capabilities are limited for users without an Apple Watch (Apple and Beats say both monitors are accurate, though the Watch is prioritized), Apple might surprise us with the upcoming AirPods Pro 3 or a future AirPods model.
As noted by AppleInsider, the company published new research exploring how sound could be used with AI to estimate heart rate. In the Foundation Model Hidden Representations for Heart Rate Estimation from Auscultation study, Apple tested six popular foundation models to see if they could be used for more than just audio transcription. The company also tested a Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model.
Instead of recording speech, these foundation models processed 20 hours of heart sounds. The study shows that Apple’s in-house CLAP model performed best, accurately measuring heart rate with AI. “We observed that the representations from the audio encoder of the in-house CLAP model achieved the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) across various data splits, outperforming the baseline model trained with standard acoustic features.”
From this, Apple researchers found that speech processing foundation models can be effectively adapted for auscultation and vital sign estimation, offering a reliable and efficient alternative to some conventional methods.”
Beyond this AI breakthrough, several rumors are circulating about the AirPods Pro 3. A body temperature sensor is another feature we might see in these earbuds or a future version. Since Apple is rumored to be working on AirPods with cameras for this purpose, it’s possible the next generation could include even more health-focused features.
Reports also point to a new H3 chip, better water and dust resistance, seamless compatibility with Vision Pro, and longer battery life. One likely improvement is upgraded Active Noise Cancellation.
