Key Points
- Apple has developed an end-to-end hearing health experience on AirPods Pro 2, featuring Hearing Protection, Hearing Test, and Hearing Aid.
- The Audio Lab in Cupertino, California, is a state-of-the-art facility where Apple engineers design, measure, and validate products with speakers or microphones.
- The lab includes specialized spaces such as the Longwave anechoic chamber and the Fantasia Lab, which simulate real-world sound scenes and enable accurate sound measurements.
Apple has announced a groundbreaking new hearing health feature on AirPods Pro 2, providing an end-to-end experience to help users protect their hearing and track their hearing health. The feature includes Hearing Protection, which helps minimize exposure to loud environmental noise, a Hearing Test that allows users to take an at-home hearing test, and a Hearing Aid that uses AirPods Pro as a clinical-grade Hearing Aid.
The development of this feature was a multi-year, cross-team collaboration involving engineers, designers, and health experts from Apple. The team worked together to create an innovative, user-friendly experience that addresses the variability of human hearing and provides intuitive and adaptable features.
The Audio Lab, located in Cupertino, California, played a crucial role in the development of these features. This state-of-the-art facility includes specialized spaces such as the Longwave anechoic chamber and the Fantasia Lab, which enable accurate sound measurements and simulation of real-world sound scenes.
The Longwave anechoic chamber is designed to measure head-related transfer functions, which is the way sound interacts with the human body. The Fantasia Lab, on the other hand, uses a spherical array of 50 loudspeakers to simulate hundreds of real-world sound scenes, such as shopping malls, busy streets, or travel on an airplane.
The end-to-end hearing health experience on AirPods Pro 2 is the latest example of Apple’s commitment to helping users on their personal 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 lives.
Actionable Tip: To take advantage of the new hearing health features on AirPods Pro 2, simply update your AirPods Pro to the latest software and follow the prompts to complete the Hearing Test and Hearing Aid setup.
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