Apple’s recent patent shows that the firm is working on AirPods equipping sensors to read, measure and monitor electrical activity of the brain of wearers.
Apple has been creative and innovative in the tech-field since its existence, introducing many new features, capabilities of various devices. The research team of Apple constantly explores new ideas that would enhance the value of products, which eventually would foster sales.
In that aspect, a new patent by Apple reveals that the firm might release an AirPod with brain-activity monitoring feature in future. The patent was published in US Patent & Trademark Office under the name “Biosignal Sensing Device using Dynamic Selection of Electrodes”.
AirPods that can read Brain Signals
The next-gen AirPods that Apple is trying to make, includes sensor at the tips of AirPods which is configured to measure biosignals or electrical activity of a user’s brain. It will house a number of active and reference electrodes at the tips for reading signals like electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG) and more.
The electrodes at the tips are categorized into subsets of electrodes, which gets activated distinctly for different uses at different times, depending on parameters of the user inputs. Say for example, there will be specified electrodes for each purpose (like EEG, EMG, EOG), and on certain times, the device may dynamically select those ‘subsets’ of electrodes, associated for that purpose.
Patent filed by Apple discusses about several ways that the firm looking into in equipping the sensors for recording the brain activity. For instance, in one case, it describes as “the wearable electronic device may include a housing and an electronic carrier attached to the housing having a nonplanar surface. The wearable electronic device may include a set of electrodes including electrodes positioned at different locations on the nonplanar surface, a sensor circuit, and a switching circuit. The switching circuit is operable to electrically connect a number of different subsets of one or more electrodes in the set of electrodes to the sensor circuit.”
Likely there are two more methods of making reading brain-activity possible with AirPods, Apple says.
In the figure-2 in the picture above, you can see numerous electrodes at the ear-bud and the 210a shaded portion is the part which upon a single tap would start measuring a biosignal, say EEG. Figure 3 and 4 shows the different pattens of active electrodes on an AirPods tip.
However, it’s not guaranteed that every patent a firm files will end up in the market and the case is same for here. Only future holds answer to this, if brain-activity measuring AirPods would be in reality. Let’s wait and see.
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