Inside the Audio Lab: How Apple developed the world’s first end‑to‑end hearing health experience
Inside the Audio Lab:
How Apple developed the world’s first end‑to‑end hearing health experience
The new hearing health features on AirPods Pro 2 are not available in all regions. Hearing Tests and Hearing Aid features are regulated health features that require regulatory approval and will be offered after authorization is received. For more information, visit apple.com/airpods-pro/feature-availability.
Apple’s 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 centre for Apple’s multiyear, cross-team collaboration to build the groundbreaking new hearing health features on AirPods Pro 2. As a free software update,1 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 every region and country, yet often goes unrecognized. Hearing is a core component of communication for so many and is an important factor for health and wellbeing,” says Shelly Chadha, M.D., the World Health Organization’s technical lead for hearing. “Technology can play an important role in raising awareness and providing intervention options for those affected by hearing loss.”
“Every person’s hearing is different, so we created an innovative, end-to-end hearing health experience that addresses this variability in a way that’s both simple to use and adaptable to a wide range of needs. That’s especially important because 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 change people’s lives — and democratize access to treatment for a condition that affects more than a billion people.”
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.
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.
“Your ears are natural amplifiers, each uniquely shaped and often slightly asymmetric,” Mazur continues. “When sound reaches one ear first before the other, it creates a time difference in how we perceive sound. This is important for us to understand so we can build experiences that accurately represent the sounds in your environment. And we do this in our 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 aeroplane — 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.
“This lab is about recreating. Just as our users experience their everyday lives moving through shopping malls or having dinner with loved ones, we had to ensure these features would meet their needs,” says Mazur. “We brought the outside in to tune and validate features that we’re building on AirPods, like the Hearing Aid feature, Conversation Boost, and Transparency mode.”
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. 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 before moving the new Hearing Test feature into clinical validation studies.
Design is also core to the user experience and plays an important role in user testing of 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.
“Within our health features, we focus on clarity and meeting users where they’re at,” says Heather Daniel, a producer in Apple’s Design Studio who helps manage all of the design work for health features. “Take the Hearing Test feature. We understood that for many people, this might be their very first time taking a hearing test, so we had to make it as seamless as possible.”
Simplifying these experiences required teams across Apple to work together every step of the way to build this software to meet the requirements for clinical testing and deliver the best product to customers.
“Just thinking about the innovation that was necessary, the density of the technology that goes into AirPods, and the amount of effort and attention to detail that went into building these complex software features,” Mazur continues, “so many teams came together — including software and hardware engineering, design, health, accessibility, clinical ops, regulatory, and the human factors engineering team — to ensure the best quality and experience.”
The end-to-end hearing health experience on AirPods Pro 2 is just the latest example of Apple’s commitment to helping users on their health journeys. For many team members, it’s the epitome of what is possible when innovation meets passion to deliver products and software that are useful and help improve users’ day-to-day.
“The fact that people can 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,” says Mazur. “They’re truly the interface to the ear.”
- Some features are not available in all regions. For more information about availability, visit apple.com/airpods-pro/feature-availability.
Please support us
TheAppWhisperer has always had a dual mission: to promote the most talented mobile artists of the day and to support ambitious, interested viewers worldwide. As the years pass, TheAppWhisperer has gained readers and viewers and has found new venues for that exchange.
All this work thrives with the support of our community.
Please consider donating to TheAppWhisperer as this New Year commences. Your support helps protect our independence, and we can keep delivering open, global promotion of mobile artists. Every contribution, however big or small, is valuable for our future.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
