Perhaps two decades ago I would've thought this was interesting and a good idea, but now stuff like this is scary as it just brings us closer to the ultra-surveillance dystopia.<p>"Everything we measure about you can and will be used against you."
"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.
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.
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.
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"<p>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.
> sending a low intensity ultrasound probing signal through an ANC headphone’s speakers.<p>I'm concerned that protracted probing may contribute to hearing loss.