Apple Develops First Hearing Health Experience In The World

Apple has developed a new hearing health experience. The state-of-the-art Audio Lab in Cupertino, California, supports the innovative work of its acoustic engineers.

They use the lab to conduct user studies in various listening rooms and test new features in its anechoic chambers, which completely absorb reflective sounds and isolate external noise.

The Audio Lab is the hub for the design, measurement, tuning, and validation of all of Apple’s products with speakers or microphones.

It’s also the center for Apple’s multiyear, cross-team collaboration to build the groundbreaking new hearing health features on AirPods Pro 2.

Available as a free software update, the end-to-end experience helps minimize exposure to loud environmental noise with Hearing Protection, track hearing with an at-home Hearing Test, and receive assistance for perceived mild to moderate hearing loss using AirPods Pro as a clinical-grade Hearing Aid.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.5 billion people around the world are living with hearing loss. Hearing loss affects individuals in many parts of the world, yet often goes unrecognized.

Hearing is a core component of communication for so many and is an important factor for health and wellbeing. And according to WHO, technology can play an important role in raising awareness and providing intervention options for those affected by hearing loss.

Hearing loss affects people of all ages with different levels of tech savviness, says Sumbul Desai, M.D., Apple’s vice president of Health.

“With the Hearing Aid feature, we wanted to build something so intuitive, it felt like an extension of your senses. We knew the results would literally change people’s lives — and democratize access to treatment for a condition that affects more than a billion people.”

Apple’d Engineers used highly specialized spaces across the Audio Lab to help make these breakthrough features possible.

“From the quietest sounds we can hear for the Hearing Test feature, to speech in noisy restaurants for the Hearing Aid feature, and even concert levels for Hearing Protection, we can bring the real world into our acoustics facilities with playback of calibrated soundscapes from all over the world, or take accurate acoustic measurements at the touch of a button,” says Kuba Mazur, Apple’s hearing health lead engineer within Acoustics Engineering.

Longwave, Apple’s largest anechoic chamber, includes a custom-built loudspeaker and microphone arc that can measure how sound interacts with the human body.

The Longwave anechoic chamber was built on a separate foundation that uses springs to isolate it from the rest of the lab, allowing for accurate sound measurements without any noise or vibration disturbances.

The chamber includes a custom-built loudspeaker and microphone arc that can measure head-related transfer functions, or in other words, how sound interacts with the human body. Having both the loudspeaker and microphone arrays within this chamber makes it a unique space with many applications, including AirPods, iPhone, and HomePod development.

Our ears are natural amplifiers, each uniquely shaped and often slightly asymmetric. When sound reaches one ear first before the other, it creates a time difference in how we perceive sound.

Therefore, this is important for Apple to understand so they can build experiences that accurately represent the sounds in the environment. Apple did this in their anechoic chambers by having someone sit in a rotating chair with AirPods Pro to capture the audio.

On the other side of the Audio Lab, to ensure the highest sound quality in every audio product Apple makes, the Fantasia Lab uses a spherical array of 50 loudspeakers to simulate hundreds of real-world sound scenes — like a shopping mall, busy street, or travel on an airplane — in a tightly controlled, evenly distributed sound field.

To fine-tune and validate the Hearing Aid feature, a broad demographic of study participants with a wide range of hearing levels were put into this controlled environment to complete a speech-in-noise test.

The test consisted of a participant sitting in a chair in the middle of the space while a complex sound scene, like a noisy restaurant, played. The participant then had to repeat the words of a single speaker, distinguishing from background conversations.

Additionally, three clinical-grade audiometric booths — the type that patients would typically encounter during hearing tests in a clinician’s office — are permanently installed in the Audio Lab.

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For internal testing, the engineering team worked with audiologists in the booths to conduct thousands of clinical-grade audiometry tests and software-based hearing tests prior to moving the new Hearing Test feature into clinical validation studies.

To simplify the Hearing Test on AirPods Pro 2, the design team conducted extensive research to determine what a person experiences when they take a traditional hearing test to identify areas that could be streamlined for any user taking the test at home.

Design is also core to the user experience and played an important role in user testing of the new features. One key experience was taking the test itself.

The team had to identify design approaches that would simplify the Hearing Test and Hearing Aid setup. It also needed to be easier to understand than the typical series of numbers a person receives during a doctor’s visit.

Simplifying these experiences required teams across Apple working together every step of the way to build this software to meet the requirements for clinical testing and delivering the best product to customers.

People can now walk around wearing their AirPods, that they can protect their hearing at concerts and get insights on their hearing health using these features over time. AirPods are doing what each person wants or needs them to do. They’re truly the interface to the ear.