麻豆村

Carnegie Mellon researchers have proven that widely available earbuds can double as heart-monitoring devices, capturing subtle cardiac activity with near-clinical accuracy and potentially expanding access to long-term, at-home care. By repurposing built-in components, the team transformed these commonplace devices into heart-vibration sensors that measure heart valve activity with nearly the same accuracy as chest-mounted medical devices.

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鈥淐ollecting these signals typically requires a clinical setting in which the patient lies down, removes their shirt, and is instrumented with accelerometers and gyroscopes,鈥� said聽, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and聽, who advised the project. 鈥淩ecordings are typically limited to a few minutes due to time constraints in busy clinics and patient discomfort during prolonged sessions. Our technology removes all of those obstacles and enables micro-cardiac monitoring at home. The secret sauce in our work is measuring the micro-cardiac rhythms with the built-in speaker. Every pair of hearables, from AirPods to Galaxy Buds, even the low-end earbuds you might get for free on an international flight and dispose of afterward, has one thing in common: a speaker.鈥�

While speakers normally push air to create sound, the team realized that by reversing the system, the same speaker can behave like a sensor and respond to tiny vibrations coming from the body, including those generated by the beating heart.

The team conducted a feasibility study with 18 users, comparing their innovative earbud-based system to standard chest-mounted medical sensors. They found that heart vibrations propagate through the body in predictable ways and can be detected both at the chest and inside the ear. By leveraging this physical connection, the team developed a machine learning pipeline that reconstructs detailed cardiac motion signals from earbud recordings. The reconstructed signals closely match those captured by medical-grade chest sensors, achieving correlations between 0.88 and 0.95.

鈥淲e discovered this works across different people and across different earbud types,鈥� said Siqi Zhang, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student and lead author on the paper.聽

Wearable technology has become increasingly popular in the last decade. While smart watches and rings can track how fast the heart beats, these transformed earbuds point to something deeper.

鈥淚nstead of just measuring how fast your heart beats, it listens to how it beats,鈥� said Zhang. 鈥淎nd that distinction matters. Mechanical timing abnormalities can precede more obvious symptoms. Subtle shifts in valve dynamics could signal disease progression long before a person feels shortness of breath.鈥�

The team believes this technology could eventually help with passively monitoring heart conditions and atrial fibrillation, as well as detect valve disorders.

鈥淢ost people already own earphones and listen to music,鈥� said Zhang. 鈥淣ow we can also monitor heart health at the same time.鈥澛�