The AirPods Pro’s Game-Changing Health Feature, Explained By Apple Execs – Forbes

Apple’s AirPods are the most popular wireless earbuds in the world for a reason: they are easy to use, sound great, and in the case of the Pro model, offer tremendous active noise cancelation — so much that I wear them on flights when I want to sleep.

But a new feature has rolled out to the AirPods Pro that pushes the earbuds beyond just entertainment use into something perhaps more important: an actual health device.

First announced during Apple’s September launch event, the second-generation AirPods Pro can become an FDA-approved, clinically validated hearing aid. This is potentially going to disrupt entire medical industries because conventional hearing aids cost an average of $2,500. Apple’s AirPods Pro retails for $350. And according to figures by the World Health Organization, over 1 billion young adults are at risk of hearing loss.

The thing is, Apple doesn’t want to just only help those with hearing loss, but prevent that from happening in the first place. So alongside the hearing aid feature are two other features: hearing test and hearing protection. The former is a clinically validated test to help test your current hearing prowess. It’s a five minute test that users can take in a quiet setting, and the results are saved to the iPhone’s Health app, and can even be exported as a file for audiologists use.

The hearing protection is perhaps the most important feature: the AirPods Pro will actively monitor the wearer’s surroundings and use machine learning algorithm to identify, and lower the decibel of, unwanted harmful noise.

All three of these features have arrived (or will arrive) to second-generation AirPods Pro via software updates.

Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, recently told me in a video interview that the team at Apple realized they could build these hearing health features with the introduction of the first AirPods Pro, which offered at the time unparalleled active noise cancelation and transparency mode.

“AirPods Pro’s active noise cancelation, which can cut down train noise, or bus noise, that allows for loud sound reduction, which helps protects your ears,” said Ternus.

Likewise, the AirPods Pro’s best-in-class transparency mode (which effectively lets certain outside sound come through to the wearer’s ears), serves as the foundation of the hearing aid feature, added Ternus.

“Using our H2 [silicon inside the AirPods Pro] along with [AI] algorithm, we are able to amplify the sound into frequencies where it’s needed.”

From my testing, the loud sound reduction works very well. Instead of just muting or lowering the volume of everything around me, the AirPods Pro are able to identify and quiet specific unnecessarily loud sounds (that no one likes to hear) like construction drilling or loud automobile engines, while leaving human speech or music volume at a normal frequency.

And the AirPods Pro’s hearing test is very similar to the same test one would take at an audiologist’s office, according to Apple’s vice president of health, Dr. Sumbul Desai.

“It is clinically validated so it’s like the same test you would take at a doctor’s office,” Dr. Desai added. “But I do want to mention it’s meant for mild and moderate hearing loss. For more severe hearing loss, then there are further testing that an audiologist can do [that the AirPods Pro cannot].”

The important thing with the hearing test, said Dr. Desai, is it essentially opens up awareness for hearing loss. She added that there are many people around the world with mild hearing loss but do not realize it. Now that anyone with a set of AirPods Pro can take a hearing test at home, it could help people become aware of the issue before it gets too bad.

I need to clarify here that the hearing health features only work for the second-generation AirPods Pro with the H2 chip that came out in September of 2022. The first generation AirPods Pro, or the standard “non-Pro” AirPods, does not support the hearing health features. I also asked Ternus if the same features will roll out to Apple’s over-ear headphones AirPods Max, but he declined comment.

Just like the Apple Watch has pivoted from initially a fashion accessory to a crucial health monitor for some now, the AirPods Pro could become just as useful going forward.