Google can turn ANC earbuds into a heart rate monitor with no extra hardware(9to5google.com)
9to5google.com
Google can turn ANC earbuds into a heart rate monitor with no extra hardware
https://9to5google.com/2023/10/27/google-anc-earbuds-heart-rate/
78 comments
When consumer-grade EEG devices started popping up a few years back, I was thinking the next step would be that they'd be integrated into headphones. I was assuming it would be a selling point, but never thought it might be a hidden feature for the benefit of the manufacturer/state.
The EEG space hasn't done anything interesting in more than a decade. I almost focused my career in the space when emotiv was first making moves. Out of curiosity, I've popped into a few conferences and they've all been pathetic. Similar to how blockchain was going to be incorporated into everything. A lot of hopeful possibilities wound up as dead ends.
Fifth generation warfare probably doesn't need a mostly useless and high noise-to-signal surveillance method like EEGs.
Fifth generation warfare probably doesn't need a mostly useless and high noise-to-signal surveillance method like EEGs.
There's unfortunately only so much you can achieve with scalp-based electrodes. The applications everyone dreams about - like fine BCI or controlling robotic arms - are hard to achieve with signals once they've had to pass through the cranium.
Imagine how much an advertiser would pay for knowing what their advert did to viewers heart rates.
‘Dystopian’ is exactly the right word.
‘Dystopian’ is exactly the right word.
Meh, the answer would be nothing in almost all cases. Pretty sure my heart rate is near constant while browsing reddit or hn.
I'd suggest looking up 'heart rate variability'. If the headphones are sensitive enough to measure that, it would be quite possible to build a stress-response profile of you with regards to different content.
Information about heart rate can answer the ultimate question: are you gay or Russian spy? Just watch this ad and we will know!
It will enable a greater genocide of gay people across the world.
> Imagine how much an advertiser would pay for knowing what their advert did to viewers heart rates.
It might be a rhetorical question but do someone in the industry has any idea? It has some value, like most metrics but my suspicion is that it is relatively low.
It is a proxy for a secondary metric. The reason people put up ads is to drive up sales, so that's the important metric. A secondary metric is engagement it can be directly measured by click through, time watching, etc... And then you have heart rate, which may indicate an emotional response, but it can be anything else. For example I am pretty sure that on average the heart rate goes up when TV ads show, but it may just be because of the physical effort of standing up and walking to the bathroom. Which is probably more significant than the emotional response caused by ads most people are desensitized about.
It might be a rhetorical question but do someone in the industry has any idea? It has some value, like most metrics but my suspicion is that it is relatively low.
It is a proxy for a secondary metric. The reason people put up ads is to drive up sales, so that's the important metric. A secondary metric is engagement it can be directly measured by click through, time watching, etc... And then you have heart rate, which may indicate an emotional response, but it can be anything else. For example I am pretty sure that on average the heart rate goes up when TV ads show, but it may just be because of the physical effort of standing up and walking to the bathroom. Which is probably more significant than the emotional response caused by ads most people are desensitized about.
>And then you have heart rate, which may indicate an emotional response, but it can be anything else.
It could be useful for A/B testing, with the heart rate metric being the average value of your overall data.
I wonder if you could also compare WHEN the heart rate increases with the timing of the ad - for example if your ad ends with a funny punchline and your logo, seeing the heart rate spike is a good sign people are laughing at it.
It could be useful for A/B testing, with the heart rate metric being the average value of your overall data.
I wonder if you could also compare WHEN the heart rate increases with the timing of the ad - for example if your ad ends with a funny punchline and your logo, seeing the heart rate spike is a good sign people are laughing at it.
Wait until we've got smart toilets analyzing our poop and pee everywhere we go.
Then there will truly be nowhere to hide.
Then there will truly be nowhere to hide.
In 2003 I installed a scale in our dorm toilet. When you sat down you push a button and when done you push it again. If you were in the top five you could enter your (three letter max) name using a two button system. Top five were displayed using a super low resolution screen similar to a pinball high score screen.
Don't be shy, give us the top score list
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I am curious as to how the scale was installed.
I think it was just a regular scale that you step on, not mounted into the toilet
Oh, duh, that would make more sense.
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Sensors under the seat I'm guessing.
This only makes sense to me if everyone poops with their legs in the air, and does not hold onto anything for support.
lotsofpulp
Hmm. May I recommend switching to a less...abrasive fiber supplement? You might be able to relax your protocol a smidge if you do.
Hmm. May I recommend switching to a less...abrasive fiber supplement? You might be able to relax your protocol a smidge if you do.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC launched the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) in September 2020. CDC developed NWSS to coordinate and build the nation’s capacity to track the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wastewater samples collected across the country.
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/wastewater-surveillance.html
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/wastewater-surveillance.html
Which is not particularly personally invasive and is a great tool.
The thing with the cryptic infection in Ohio was maybe personally invasive (but as far as I know, no PII has been revealed): https://www.darkdaily.com/?p=43174
The thing with the cryptic infection in Ohio was maybe personally invasive (but as far as I know, no PII has been revealed): https://www.darkdaily.com/?p=43174
I make no judgement about its invasiveness or usefulness. A possible future is for this monitoring to go further upstream to become more personalized and cross boundaries into other monitoring domains, as other comments noted many pharmaceutical products or metabolites can be detected in human waste.
Possibly something holding practical implementations back is all the other waste put into sewage, which may stop things up in the manner of “fatbergs.” [0]
A related idea I have percolating is to change municipal composting programs from bins and trucks to grind and pipe by deploying more sink fixtures that grind food materials into small pieces so they go thru the drain. Then focus extracting/separating biological materials from other effluvium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg
Possibly something holding practical implementations back is all the other waste put into sewage, which may stop things up in the manner of “fatbergs.” [0]
A related idea I have percolating is to change municipal composting programs from bins and trucks to grind and pipe by deploying more sink fixtures that grind food materials into small pieces so they go thru the drain. Then focus extracting/separating biological materials from other effluvium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg
"All waste samples were thoroughly anoymized".
Governments were doing that kind of sampling before Covid too, eg for drugs.
https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/study-tracks-illicit-dr...
https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/study-tracks-illicit-dr...
Sooner than you think: https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-designed-a-smart-...
On a slightly less dystopian note, I can't wait for the DefCon talk on spoofing anus prints
On a slightly less dystopian note, I can't wait for the DefCon talk on spoofing anus prints
Are we sure this wasn't posted 8 days late?
Why stop at toilets?
https://supercombodeluxe.com/gmen/
https://supercombodeluxe.com/gmen/
That may already be a thing (garbage weighing) somewhere. There was a trial where residents were be billed by the weight of their garbage. The trial involved adding QR codes to the bins and an adapted garbage truck that weighed the bin and read the QR code upon disposal. I don't know what happened after the trial (or if they had an incognito mode).
It's currently operated in Dublin. Barcode on back of each of 3 bins (recyclables, non-recyclables and organic). Recyclables and organic are free, and non-recyclables includes a quota of x kg per month included in your monthly fee. You pay extra per kg if you go over the quota for non-recyclables in any month. The system encourages recycling, but at the risk of people contaminating the (free) recyclables bin with non recyclable material.
There's places where your tax amount depends on how much trash by weight you produce. I know people in some of those cities that drive their trash to the next town over and avoid paying.
> Wait until we've got smart toilets analyzing our poop and pee everywhere we go.
I'm hacking on a local-only, slurp-every-data-point-about-myself program, and I missed adding a analyzer for feces and urine! Thanks for sharing your sarcasm :)
I'm hacking on a local-only, slurp-every-data-point-about-myself program, and I missed adding a analyzer for feces and urine! Thanks for sharing your sarcasm :)
I work in microbiology lab automation. Setting up automated culturing shouldn't be out of reach with the tech available to ordinary people today, but it will smell pretty bad.
I read that novel... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Method_(novel)
Pooping in the woods will be made illegal as it avoids government tracking.
Smart Pipe is a registered sex offender
https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ
https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ
Thank you for this. I figured someone had to.
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Totally, the trust was broken long ago and solidified when they removed "don't be evil". Same for most tech companies. Mozilla still has its soul, craigslist too, a few others...
Yes, how soon until your smart/spy/corporate door refuses to let you out, because your smart/spy/corporate phone has determined you're ill, even if you are asymptomatic?
All your base (heart rate) are belong to us! [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
If you see "Google" anywhere, replace with "advertising giant and leading surveillance capitalist" and you can gauge how happy you should be with the new tech development that is presented.
"With no extra hardware" seems to be a loose interpretation of the paper. Their solution, according to the paper, involves either a COTS earbud that has been taken to pieces and wired into their signal processing box, or a full custom preproduction earbud with 6 extra microphones and an unreleased signal pipeline.
It is not a an unfair interpretation.
They are using the ANC speaker mic pair as the source of _acoustic_ information to infer HR from within the earbud.
As in there are no electrode pads or light sensors or some other known method for HR monitor.
They are using the ANC speaker mic pair as the source of _acoustic_ information to infer HR from within the earbud.
As in there are no electrode pads or light sensors or some other known method for HR monitor.
ANC = Active Noise Cancelling
...as in it has a microphone.
...as in it has a microphone.
Any speaker is also a microphone, so the ANC mic is probably not required.
For simple audio devices, maybe with a hardware revision, but it's unlikely the driver circuitry would be routed back to an analog sensing pin unless you were doing some closed loop feedback stuff
IIRC some Realtek cards did have the hardware to route it that way.
I mean you can literally plug a regular pair of headphones into a microphone port instead of a speaker port, then yell into them, and it'll record your voice.
But yes the Google buds are Bluetooth and use separate microphones to send recorded audio back to the device for voice calls, etc.
But yes the Google buds are Bluetooth and use separate microphones to send recorded audio back to the device for voice calls, etc.
The idea is to use both the speaker and the microphone at the same time.
I'm not aware of anyone doing that with a single electromagnet and 2 wires.
I'm not aware of anyone doing that with a single electromagnet and 2 wires.
A speaker is a microphone in the same way that a bicycle is a motorbike.
You don't need any mods to make a speaker act as a microphone... Just like an LED doesn't need any mods to be a light sensor
Not to the driver/microphone, but you do need to mod the circuitry it was attached to. And amplifier isn’t magically pre-amp.
Same with an alternator... Pretty sure it can be used both ways... The circuit can do both if designed right... That's childs play
I've tried it many times with many kinds of headphobes and it was always plug and play without any modifications.
When we were kids, it was common knowledge and cheaper to use headphones as a mic. Just plug headphones into mic jack and they work as mic.
Yes, the Google Pixel buds has a microphone. This shouldn't be surprising.
I tried to disable the cookies through the consent form on this site. But that form is very, very long... Just impossible to disallow cookies in a standard way.
That's why I use ddg browser.
I click "accept all" and then clean all tabs.
Good for you, but that is not what most ppl will or can do. It is a dark pattern to make it so difficult to reject cookies.
If I'm reading this correctly, "audioplethysmography" is more than heart rate. It's a plot of the actual functioning of the heart, and can detect problems with valves, irregular heartbeat, clogged arteries, etc, too.
It seems a lot like photoplethysmograph (PPG), in that you get a time domain signal of something related to instantaneous capillary blood pressure, and you process that signal to derive heart rate, and sometimes HRV and other things. The APG transducer is a microphone rather than a PPG LED+photodiode optical pickup.
I don't know how far you could take it though. Irregular heartbeat in a resting patient, possibly. Clogged artery not in the measurement path in an active patient - probably not. The further from the heart the less and less it looks like an ABP blood pressure wave. I bet activities like jumping up and down would show some amount of interference from blood sloshing around in APG just like in PPG.
If you want to look at some data, https://physionet.org/ has some recordings of PPG and ABP and you can see how they differ. (Edit) like this one: https://physionet.org/content/mimic3wdb-matched/1.0/
I don't know how far you could take it though. Irregular heartbeat in a resting patient, possibly. Clogged artery not in the measurement path in an active patient - probably not. The further from the heart the less and less it looks like an ABP blood pressure wave. I bet activities like jumping up and down would show some amount of interference from blood sloshing around in APG just like in PPG.
If you want to look at some data, https://physionet.org/ has some recordings of PPG and ABP and you can see how they differ. (Edit) like this one: https://physionet.org/content/mimic3wdb-matched/1.0/
It might be clearer for them to say that Google could make another device using the same BOM as the earbud. The title made me think that it only required custom software.
There was a startup years ago, not sure what happened to it, that was using earlobes for realtime blood pressure monitoring which is a "holy grail"
Ultimate accessory for a sports watch would be to have earbuds that also monitor HRV and blood pressure which is pretty much garbage from the risk at high intensity.
Ultimate accessory for a sports watch would be to have earbuds that also monitor HRV and blood pressure which is pretty much garbage from the risk at high intensity.
More like heart-to-heart-chat-monitor
> sending a low intensity ultrasound probing signal through an ANC headphone’s speakers.
I'm concerned that protracted probing may contribute to hearing loss.
I'm concerned that protracted probing may contribute to hearing loss.
is that why my bose qc 45 lasts much less on a battery than bose qc 35?
You must have gotten a dud because my qc45s last much longer than my 35s. I’ve been using them 8 hours a day for years too. So much in fact I replaced the “unreplaceable” battery in my 35’s.
that's spycraft
I really hate using earbuds and will never use them. I use over ear real headphones.
"Everything we measure about you can and will be used against you."