07 Nick Hunn: The future of ‘Hearables’

And two strong themes include the nuances of human perception and behavior around this highly intimate technology and the search for sustainable business models based on all that data that wearables collect. This episode is on the longer side, but to be frank, it was tough to edit Nick down as he delivers all killer and no filler. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

One of the things that was fascinating around the time we met is the development of miniature sensors. that was very much driven by the phone industry. Manufacturers realized that you could put more into phones, and this was even before Apple came on the scene. We were seeing accelerometers, other sorts of sensors, and we saw the beginning of a sort of consumer medical devices, where people were saying, we can actually put sensors in things that you can wear.

and that's where sort of the wearables industry started up probably about 10 years ago before we were sitting there talking to each other. at that point, I think a lot of it was around smart clothing. And we then got to the point that technology could shrink down to where you could start to put it in something you put on your wrist. And that was the original Fitbits, the Garmins. All of these things that we no longer remember because they they came, they flared up and they went. And

it felt to me at the time that everybody was concentrating on the wrist. In a way, because it was the easy thing to do. But it's about the worst possible place to put a sensor. these sensors like to be close to your body. They don't like moving around. And we all shake our hands around all the time. The ear is the exact opposite. It's designed to be the most stable part of our body. It's what keeps us upright and sort of, it's moist, it's close to blood flow, it's the ideal place to put sensors.

And people had been experimenting with that. at the same time we were beginning to see developments in Bluetooth technology, which meant you could shrink stuff down to the size of earbuds. And that's when I also got involved with, starting to work on the new Bluetooth audio standards, working alongside a lot of hearing aid companies and realizing what amazing tech actually goes into hearing aids. We forget just how clever the tech in hearing aids is.

Most of them are way ahead of what we typically see in earbuds today. but, it's one reason they're expensive. Because it's a real sort of technical 3D origami job, And that was when it struck me that we probably ought to be focusing on putting more into our ears.

That started to happen in terms of putting sensors in, but most of it has been just lots of little white things in our ears that lets us consume more music content I still feel, maybe 10 years on from when we had that first conversation, I was saying, no, the ear is the place. That we're only just at the beginning of what we can actually do in terms of Putting medical sensors on ourselves and really making hearables and headworn devices into the way that we move forward.

So it's an exciting period. We're seeing lots of different things coming together. I think we're seeing some really clever products. We're seeing some. really bizarre, if not stupid products. And at some point in the next four or five years, I'm hoping we're going to see something that takes data off those and gives us back something useful.

but where would you say we are? what have been the hits and misses and why haven't wearables lived up to the expectations that we had maybe 10 years ago?

And then we'll give you back some information that will actually help you to improve your life. And a lovely story. there's one real issue with it, which is In general, the companies making wearables are hardware companies. They're really good at cramming lots of tech into a small product. of them are really good at making it look attractive and having a user interface. But generally, they know very little about data analytics.

stream all of this data off, the problem is when you start, you don't actually know whether you can infer anything out of it. You need a lot of data from a lot of people, generally, in order to do any useful data analytics, need quite a lot of additional metadata in order to put that into perspective.

And then you hope that once you've acquired all of that you're going to be able to infer something is so useful that the person will probably give you an ongoing monthly contract to get updates on what comes back. And nobody's really worked out what that is. If you look at almost every wearable, of it's about consuming data from something else. The most successful one have been earbuds.

earbuds are shipping out in their billions each year all they're used for, bar a very few exceptions, is just to consume content. It's streaming music or podcasts into your ears. If we look at the smartwatches, Apple's the most successful but it doesn't have that many applications that are actually using the data it collects. most people are using it simply as a smaller screen so they don't have to get the phone out of the pocket.

And what that probably tells us is people would rather not have to look at their phones a lot of the time but just have information conveyed to them. The issue for almost all wearable manufacturers has been, how do you capture the consumer with a compelling application? you've certainly got some for the sort of the, Professional amateur end of sort of athletics and sports, but you don't have a lot else. even for medical applications and health applications people have.

A long term chronic condition which will improve even if they just monitor their data and look at it. They're not widely used. And companies have set up to try and do things with this and they've generally lasted a year or two and then just gently disappeared. We don't see much which goes much beyond counting steps. to be perfectly honest, the Japanese had little things that you tied onto your shoelaces 30 years ago that did that.

and I don't know how we get over that point of accumulating enough data to be able to do some useful inference to provide feedback that people will pay for.

or human beings, are very good at not actually following advice or deciding they'll just do something else because it doesn't matter today. I know it probably doesn't matter tomorrow. There are those, and it's a small segment, who will slavishly follow what they're told because I think it's going to make them better. But the vast majority don't. that's the issue for the industry. That you can make something really shiny and attractive with flashing lights and nice OLED screens.

But if it's going to do much more than just show you your latest train ticket or you an easy way to look at your messages without getting your phone out it isn't actually changing very much. It's just Another alternative way of conveying information. Apple, I think, is a fascinating company because many of their users have signed up so that their data is going off to a store somewhere and I assume that somebody somewhere is looking at it and trying to infer something.

When it first came out, Apple had quite a big research project to working with different medical institutes to you to grant your data so that they could use that to try and come up with better ways to cope with our health. I've not heard very much come out of that.

And I suspect the issue is it's actually a It's rather more difficult trying to give us personalized health information on an ongoing daily basis than people tend to think when you just say, look, I can measure some things so I can tell you how to improve your life.

But we're all at that point, hoping that there is something out there, and that one day we're going to find it, and a combination of sensors will provide the data, which gives us real marker that can be used, and you've got, certainly different areas looking at it, you have People, companies, researchers are totally altruistic about this, that they really want to be able to keep people alive longer to reduce suffering, and that's great.

you have some very hard nosed companies out there saying, if we can do this, we can make sort of 29, 50, whatever a month out of every person on the world. And we're still in this hope bubble of surely if we get enough data, we will be able to find something. that's now transformed itself and called itself AI, that if we have enough data, something will come out of it. but I think we're all wondering just what is it and when are we going to see it?

So people just put them on their kids or their dogs. So there'd be data stream going back. that's one of the interesting ones that people saw those as generally a source of revenue, either because it reduced their insurance costs, or else they could flog it to somebody else, but didn't primarily see it as something that was actually going to make them healthier. we're complicated beings, which is great in many ways. It's not so wearables manufacturer.

this, we'll see, sharper opportunities, for those manufacturers, but let's get back to hearing aids then. So we talked about with both. I'm struck by how high tech those devices are. I don't know quite when it happened, let's call it the last 10, 15 years, there's, they were digitized. So could you talk about what that phase change from analog to digital meant for hearing aids?

there's certainly companies where you'll see, senior managers and even owners themselves trained as audiologists and will still go out and be fitting kids and other people with hearing aids. because there's all sorts of issues that we know are associated with hearing loss. not least the lack of social interaction. There's estimates that you're likely to, get Alzheimer's probably five or six years earlier if you have hearing loss. potentially, again, due to that lack of social interaction.

it's really good to help people with hearing. Hearing aids got smaller, but with analogue technology, there wasn't too much you could do. They were basically just amplifiers and filters that would try and amplify the particular frequencies that would help with hearing. Digitization really made a major step change in the way they could work.

and a key part of that was you started to go away from simple analogue to using digital signal processors, commonly called DSPs, to do all of that processing. for listening. Those allowed you to do much more in terms of looking at what would actually help individuals, with, all of the differences that you have between the different types of hearing loss. But the other important aspect of those is it allowed you to have more microphones. There's a number of reasons you want more microphones.

The first one is that if you have more than one microphone, you can actually position them as an array so you can start to do beam steering. And that means you can Arrange it to try and pick up sound that may be coming from in front of you or from around you. And that's something that you want depending on where you are. If you're just talking to a single person, you ideally want to pick up the sound from in front of you and not pick up what may be behind you or beside you.

if you're at the theatre, that's exactly what want to do. You want to have that sound coming in if you're watching a television. If you're in the middle of a meeting You want to hear sound from all around you. if you're at the dinner table with friends, and you've got the family round for dinner, you want to hear all around you. So by using multiple microphones, you can start to play those tricks of actually changing the characteristic of what you're picking up.

You've got the ability as well to start to process the sound around you and use that to Make an estimate of where you are. Are you in a restaurant? Are you walking down the street? Are you in a quiet room? And using that to then attenuate certain frequencies, which may be getting in the way of speech recognition, or to open that up. And it's around this time you'll see that hearing aids started to include something called a preset.

And those were, Basically, simple pre configured programs that would change the way the hearing aid worked in terms of trying to filter out unwanted sound and to concentrate on the wanted sound. Those typically require a user to change them, to suit where they are. That may be pressing a button on them. you may use it from a little remote control and more recently, you may have an app on your phone that will do that. And on the latest hearing aids coming out, that becomes more automated.

So those functions. allowed the hearing aids to, pack in a lot more in terms of capability. But once you go digital, you get the advantages of Moore's law, and you can start to shrink things down. That, in theory, means you can make smaller hearing aids, and we have ones you can now fit within your ear canal, as opposed to the ones that over the back of your ear. And it also means, by taking those advantages of Moore's law, that you can increase battery life.

And the hearing aid industry is amazing. at how low power it can do audio. it makes you look at all of the other earbuds out there and think. That's really quite poor technology, and the aim of a hearing aid is they typically used to run off a single little, zinc oxide air cell, which would provide that hearing aid, it would be in your ears, typically average hearing aids worn for 10 to 12 hours a day, and that would last and work listening the whole time for five or six days.

that's incredibly better than anything else that you'll buy in a consumer product.

It was one of the fascinating things I discovered when I was working with hearing aid companies and also getting them to work within specification groups, is when you write specifications, you generally say, Let's make this sort of general purpose because people use it in different ways and you realize for the hearing aid companies that each of them are Optimizing their designs to the nth degree that each of the most of the hearing aid companies will work designing their own chips they may do

that internally they may do it with very specialist low powered chip designers and They don't put in any anything really that they're not going to use. If you look at a lot of the consumer electronics, it's the same chips that go into headsets and hearing aids and speakers, and they're designed very much as general purpose chips.

you look at how long it takes to produce a new version of a chip, If you're looking at very customised chips of the highest performance, you can look at a turnaround time from start of design to spinning and taping out and getting the chips back in production of about five years. If you look at commercial products, That rate is down 18 months. the chips going into consumer products spin much faster but they typically don't optimize anything like as much in order to do that.

And, because they're going into multiple products you get a sort of tick box design of how many different things can I put into it which, even if they're not being used, leech some of the power away. yes, you could take that approach But for most consumer products, Apple did a really clever thing with its battery box. I say Apple, company that first really started the first hearables in terms of earbuds was a German company called Bragi.

a Kickstarter campaign for a pair of earbuds called the Dash. It is a testament to how good that company was that they actually managed to ship product that worked. They are so complex to do. but they designed a battery box and the theory is you take things out of Euros and you put them in the battery box and they recharge. And most users don't realize that their earbuds don't have an all day battery life because they keep on taking them out while they have a conversation, put them into charge.

The issue with hearing aids is you can't take them out to have a conversation. that's the whole point of hearing aids. You put them in your ears when you wake up and they stay in the whole day and they have to be on and work the whole day.

So it's, A very different way of designing that hearing aids you have to have that at least a day long battery life and hearing aids are going rechargeable you really need to design them to try and give you about a two day battery life so you've got a spare day when you've left your charger behind.

But for Earbuds, we're just seeing on the consumer side, people are saying no, we want to put in more features, we want to have more flashing lights, we want spatial technology, we want all of the rest of this. And the overall battery life doesn't go up. What actually happens is you find the battery box gets a bit bigger, so it's got a bit more charging to keep them boosted for all of those points where you take them out.

But it relies on the fact that you will take them out and not realise that if you hadn't done that you'd have lost that. but in everyday life, that battery box is an absolutely brilliant trick to fool everybody into thinking you've

got a product that's been designed with decent battery life

that's slightly changed recently. Do you just want to talk about shift?

The reason most people go for a hearing test that their partner has told them that if they don't, they're going to have a divorce. and it's that frustration of not being able to hear each other. I know from my own parents, my dad would turn the TV up to a point that it deafened everybody else in the room, and there was a constant fight over the remote control for the TV set.

it's those practical issues of hearing loss that finely drive people to get hearing aids and far too few people go and get a hearing test at the point they should do. there's a knock on effect for that, which is that most hearing aids are designed for people with quite severe hearing loss. because if nobody's going to come and buy one when they've got just low levels of hearing loss, why design a product for a market that doesn't admit that it wants it?

And once you get to those higher levels, you really need a product that can be set up to work for you. Hence the of taking it through an audiologist. because at that level of hearing loss as well, if you get it wrong, and you just go and get hold of a hearing aid from somewhere and put it in and it's incorrectly set up, it could do more damage than good. there's a very good reason for that.

I said, Only about 10 percent of people who need hearing aids have them, so there is a massive market out there that still is largely unexplored. And I think a lot of that sort of comes down to the stigma, which is what stops people going out and having their initial hearing test.

everybody would. Buller you, you'd be called Specky or Four Eyes, And then John Lennon came along and suddenly glasses were fashionable. and the world's never looked back. We have fashion brands in glasses. We have a whole multi billion pound industry. Making glasses frames and they're very desirable and despite the fact that you can get contact lenses Lots of people still like wearing glasses.

It's great it's so why can't it happen to our ears and I don't think anybody knows the answer now one of the Interesting aspects to that and you see this with hearing aids have tried to make themselves looking conspicuous Hearing aids today are just incredibly small, lightweight, and you don't really notice that people are wearing them. and still there's a stigma to them.

One of the interesting issues, I think many of us thought that AirPods would kill that stigma, but if you're wearing them, The assumption is you're not paying attention to somebody trying to talk to you. And in order to pay attention, that person expects you to take out your AirPods and put them back in the battery box so that they're not listening to something else. And we still equate them with earplugs, which mean I don't want to listen to you. And I don't know whether we can change that.

we had one or two manufacturers do things like now we've got transparent modes, so you can just. Tap them and they turn off or they actually work as hearing aids and make it easier for me to listen to you. But there's no way that other person in that conversation knows it. We've seen some manufacturers even putting little lights on to say, we'll light the screen when we're in transparent mode so that people know that you really are paying attention. But, that hasn't worked.

So I don't know what going to change it. One of the interesting ones, and it's a sort of a side one, I've become very aware, and since Bluetooth LE audio has come out, That's the new Bluetooth standard, which slowly going to take over the way that we listen to audio using Bluetooth. It's much, much more flexible. It lets you share music with other people. has lots of great things in it, and it's also designed to be low power, so it's in hearing aids.

And some of the people in the companies that have got these, seeing are wearing these now all day. Because you can use them for your phone conversations like this. you can use it for listening at music. are so lightweight, you barely know you're wearing them. Part of me thinks there's a market here for actually taking those and selling them as professional office earbuds.

And maybe if that happened, and I don't think any of these companies are looking at doing that's a totally new market, and these aren't companies that necessarily go out for professional. Unknown new markets that could start to change the stigma. You can't see them being worn. They work really well. And one of the fascinating things coming back is talking to those people. They say, and actually I listened to more music. Now I'm wearing them because they're there.

And the quality is sufficiently good that you'll listen to music with them.

So that they took some nice footage and released an open source image library of, aspirational people wearing hearing aids. modern contemporary, hearing aids. And then another one you put me on to was, Deaf Metal, which is such a great name. Do you want to talk about that?

and that appears almost to be a brain learning one of brain no longer distinguishing between the multiple signals that are coming back. and there's concerns as to whether that may be a result again of just having something in your ear too long and you no longer start to hear the cacophony of sound around you and actually lose some of your ability to process. Compared to most of our other sensors, hearing is still one of the lesser known ones.

But yes, coming back, there are people that are looking at accessories to try and make these things better. For kids, there are wonderful colors you can get on their hearing aids. They really like them. us adults that are saying, Oh no, that makes me look like some grumpy old man if I wear one of those. I'm not going to do that. Which is

let's come back to, Apple and getting more hearing aids into people's ears earlier. Apple have, launched the iPod Pro 2, which has been certified by the FDA as some kind of hearing augmentation device. And interestingly, they've also, introduced a sort of hearing test, on the phone And they've introduced a bunch of technologies there, which

And they've now gone, added in, a hearing test, so you pop your AirPod Pro 2s in, it runs through fairly decent hearing tests, produces an audiogram, will then allow you to set up those AirPod to effectively act as a hearing aid, augmenting your hearing. I think the most important thing about it is it moves the stigma of having to go and book a hearing test. You can just try it in the comfort of your room, and I'm sure a lot of people will do it just because you can.

And a significant number of those are probably going to do it and discover that they have got a hearing problem. To me, that's the most important thing that's going to come out of this. whether they then continue to use, their existing ear pods because it's mild, or whether they decide they need to go and have a proper hearing test and maybe get a more competent hearing aid.

Because hearing loss is a spectrum, we're born with more or less perfect hearing and it gets worse after that being the perverse creatures We are we do our best to try and see how much of it we can destroy as quickly as we can by Going off to discos and listening to loud music and using power tools and all of the rest of So finding out you've got a problem is the first and most important step.

and hopefully that's going to persuade people, to do safer listening, which may well be in the works, hobbies, lifestyle, whatever, also to think about where they need to be on the step of gradually moving from earbuds aids. And I think if that happens, Apple has done a great service to the world. it will probably increase sales of hearing aids. and it's one of those fascinating ones that I see a lot of analysts saying, Oh, this will kill the hearing aid companies.

And I rather suspect the hearing aid companies are thinking, No, this is going to increase our sales. we still have this gap in the middle of moderate hearing loss, which the Apple devices are unlikely to be able to correct.

And I think there's a grey area in the middle where we need a lot more research as we get more and more people with moderate hearing loss starting to sign up to hearing aids. Quite serious, Eric.

even though you're never going to hear any of these if you're listening in sort of anything other than perfect listening conditions. the other aspect of course is with Once you're into moderate hearing loss, you need something that's got an all day battery life. which isn't something that's very high on the list of requirements for most consumer

products.

So can use that whenever we're having these conversations And then we have the second one, which is for music streaming, which is called A2DP, or Advanced Audio Distribution Profile. and that basically streams stereo music to your speakers, headphones, or hearing aids. But it's one way streaming. Since they were written, uh Audio has developed a lot, we have far more audio capabilities, as well as telephony, we have voice over IP, lots of other ways of doing things.

And for music streaming, we stream from different devices. We also want to talk to Siri to tell it to change music, which you can't easily do because A2DP is one way, and we may want to mix and match lots of different things during the course of the day. If you go from listening to your television, to answering a phone call, to having a conversation like this, really difficult to do it with the existing standards.

we started off saying we want to make a really versatile toolbox that will do any type of audio. We can have any number of audio streams going from a source device, whether that's voice or music, to the sync device, which is your earbuds, your hearables, speakers, whatever. And you can have the streams going the other way. And if you want, you can actually mix and match, you could be talking to one Siri device while your television is streaming music to you.

we initially thought, can we build this on the existing framework? And we rapidly came to the conclusion that this actually needs to start afresh from a new blank piece of paper, if we're going to do it properly. Which is what we did. And we've come up with a set of standards called Bluetooth. audio. key part of them is we have a brand new codec. It's a much more efficient codec. It's much higher quality.

And unlike our previous codecs, the same codec works for both voice and for high quality music. it uses about half the bandwidth that existing codecs did, to give you the same audio quality. that's all in, but the other really interesting one is we've added a broadcast capability. And what that means is that multiple people can listen to a single source of music, or a single source of audio.

that may be in your TV, that if you're sitting around, everybody can listen to the TV using their own earbuds or hearing aids. You can have multiple different streams in it, so your TV today, if you're streaming with Amazon, you can go and look in the languages and you'll see that there are some what are called dialogue boosted versions, which have been mixed to make the sound easier for people with hearing loss.

And typically, that's done in the cinema today, most cinemas have telecoil which provide a broadcast capability. And the sound that's fed to that from your film typically has the background noise and the background music reduced, and the dialogue volume increased so that it's easier to pick it out. But now it's going to be possible to

if you're watching a film, you can have multiple different soundtracks being transmitted. And you can just select, do I want this in the original language, or do I want it in English, or do I want it in something else. If you've got hearing loss, you could say, I would like to have the audio enhanced version of it. And there is very low latency. One issue if you have traditional Bluetooth the latency, particularly if you're streaming from a TV, is really poor.

It's about 200 milliseconds and you have a lip sync issue. You can see it's not right. We've pulled the latency down now. you can get it down to about to 30 milliseconds, really can't distinguish that. And it means this is really good in a live environment. I've been at a number of concerts, where we've had demos of this being done, where it's being broadcast. So anybody with hearing aids in the audience that support this can hear it. And you realize that if you can hear both the ambient.

And also the transmitted version. And I was at a fascinating large scale work in New York, and the composer who I knew was there, and he was saying, what I'm hearing through the broadcast actually what's written on the page of the score, and what I'm hitting in the auditorium is what was in my head when I was writing it, but which is the right one? It's been fascinating. The whole of the broadcast is branded as AuraCast.

And you can use it so you can share music from your phone with your friends. But it also means there's lots of public things. So if you're at a bus shelter, you could just tap on your phone and say, are the next buses? And it would tell you. in whichever languages it supports. for voice, the bandwidth is sufficiently low. You could probably support a dozen different languages just off one little Bluetooth chip.

So you can certainly do that with, an app on the phone. we have the ability, you can just take your phone, scan a QR code that might be on your TV. If you walk into a theatre, a code on that. you buy a theatre ticket, you can have that already built into the theatre ticket that's downloaded to your phone so that it knows as you walk in what it needs to connect to. we'll support NFC if you want to, so something that taps. you can have little remote controls.

that, today if you have a hearing aid, people typically buy a remote control for changing the volume. can use that will allow you to change, this. You can build it into a smartwatch, so you can have a control on your smartwatch, again, just tap your smartwatch against a reader. the spec allows this sort of third device, whether it's just a simple wearable wristband, whether it's a smartphone or another device, that can do all of the work for you.

And it then tells your hearing aids or your earbuds, go and listen to that. this third device never ever receives the audio, but it can detect what is around, what's available, and then tell your hearing aids or your devices that are rendering the audio to go and latch on to that particular one. If you walk into the room with your own TV in, that TV can notice that you're there and say, do you want to listen to me? And that could just be a tap and yes, I do or no, I don't.

There's no reason why you can't migrate some of that, at least for standard enquiries that you might know, such as connecting to what's around you, that can't be done locally. generally you will want to do it in a device that's got a bigger battery because that sort of work takes a fair bit of power and you don't want your earbuds to do it. this is one also thing we've done with LE Audio is it's very asymmetric. If I'm streaming from my phone, my phone's doing all the hard work.

so we try to offload as much as possible. If you're wearing headband, earphones, you've got room for bigger batteries, you can move more of the processing up to the edge and actually have it happening in the ear.

And it may do that over and above, mixed in with whatever you're listening to. It's intriguing how voice is coming back because everything our phones did used to be voice. We made voice calls and that was it. And then when Spotify came along, really, that was the point that we saw the growth in and then in earbuds. We stopped talking to people and we just started listening to stuff. With voice assistants and also with podcasts, we started moving back to voice.

And we're beginning to see people the approach that if you're looking at augmented reality as you're walking along don't need to start transmitting video onto your glasses. A lot of the time you can just have something talk to you. And those little voice prompts work really well if you're looking at hearables. As you walk along, it's just what you do. When you're on a bus, the bus telling you when you need to get off at the next stop.

And the things that you use to take your phone out of your pocket to check, you no longer need to do it. It takes away an awful lot of what you do with a smartwatch as well, of why do you need to look at a smartwatch if it just tells you what you need to know when you need to know. And, that's the important bit of telling you what you need to know and when you need to know, getting that what and when right. And that's down to the AI and the user experience designers.

And. Not quite sure that we've got user experience and AI tying in together too well. We've seen some of the products, like the human pin, the AI,

It's just making some really basic decisions It will get better, but there are hearing aids out there from a couple of brands that have some quite convincing AI that is doing exactly what you described and working out where are you And deciding how the device needs to operate, both in that environment and with your particular aspects of hearing loss. And it's fascinating that, as you said, you were surprised how much tech is in hearing aids and how far ahead they are of a lot of the industry.

the AI in hearing aids is way ahead of the AI in most consumer electronics. You mentioned the ears, the types of how much you

health monitoring capabilities or potential ones that we. mentioned briefly at the top. but you mentioned that, that the wrist is a pretty suboptimal place to put, sensors ears, I've got advantages and could you just talk about the types of health markers you might be able to pick up or can pick up, in the air and how you see that moving,

Again, there used to be devices, back sort of 100 years back, where people would measure blood temperature through the year.

But the secondary benefit, because you've got your semicircular canals there, which is what you use to keep you stable, is it's an incredibly stable one. You don't move your head around very much. So those sensors can all be put in. Now, there is the issue of making them small enough ensuring that they stay in contact because with the wrist, you've got an elastic band that holds it in place. you can't quite do that in the ear.

And if you try and do it by shoving stuff in the ear, it blocks the ear so you can't hear anything. So there are practical issues that need to be looked at. By putting something in both ears, you've got the opportunity to start to do ECGs, and there's a few people that have put ECGs out there. And if you really want to wear wristbands as well, you've then got four points to play with. So, these things are all happening at small scales from people that are just with what you can do.

But the great thing about this, and you talked early on about all the Fitbits and the other things, which used once, and once the battery's died it goes into the back of the bedroom drawer. Is, with earbuds, you buy them predominantly to listen to music, or conversation. Which means you keep on putting them back in your ear. And that's where hearables really have a win, in terms of biometric sensor, that you're not putting them on to measure your biometrics.

You're putting them on because you want to listen to music. And as a by product, you're getting the biometric stream out. That's where you then hit this unfortunate dichotomy of the people that want to sell you earbuds, have absolutely no interest, generally, in pulling

back any biometric data from you.

there are companies out there that are making them and desperately trying to get earbud manufacturers to put them in. It's turning that into that compelling feedback that makes people sign subscriptions. and that is where we see this issue that most hardware vendors aren't into that business of as a service with a monthly subscription. Apple, if anybody could do it. and as I said before, I, we've seen signs in the past that they're interested in doing it and then much has come of it.

I don't know. And it's a company, it's difficult to tell where it's going. It has a very, efficient business model for what it does, in terms of selling hardware and in licensing apps. does it want to get into data and health management?

it's not Apple that is making the money out of that. Apple are selling the hardware and making the money out of the hardware sale. I'm, it's fascinating where it will go and. I don't know, but Apple has the scale to do it, if it wants to do it, and if it thinks it can make money out of it.

unless you can provide a compelling application that results in some degree of compliance that makes people look after themselves, then it's just a set of numbers for the sake of a set of numbers. and that's it. That's a societal attitude towards healthcare, which tech would dearly love to solve, but I'm not sure it will. we need some other changes within that.

I think one of the things that is interesting and we've touched on is are being used more for voice they have been for quite a long time. we see this in, say, in people listening to podcasts. starting, I think, to see A bit more voice interaction happening. And one thing with earbuds, headphones, they have shut people off from the outside world. beginning to see a few things happening where looking at seeing how we might be able to use hearables to actually bring back conversation.

of making it easier to talk in possibly noisy spaces, for looking at small groups that are talking together in maybe a more distributed environment. And I think that's going to be interesting because, telephony historically has been a one to one, listening has got rid of that and just say, no we listen to content that's already been provided.

would be nice to see us going back to being more social and has done an efficient job of trying to remove that and put in sort of false social networks in its place. So I don't know how that will happen.

I do think what hearables will do, particularly as we talk about that whisper in your ear and little bits of information when you need it, is we will lessen the amount of time we want to spend with our phones, that we will still need the global connectivity to a degree that still needs something with a decent battery and to have enough life and be able to get the range. But I think it's going to be something that we concentrate on less than we do today.

It's just something that's there and we vocalize what we want and then it happens. and that's just pulling in what we have with voice recognition, putting in Sensible AI, where more of that will actually be done at the edge in terms of recognizing what we want. at better ways we deal with it. One of the fascinating things going around at the moment looking at codec technology.

a realization that most codecs that we use for voice aren't particularly good at conveying the underlying emotions in voice. And we're seeing people looking at how do you bring that back in. And once you know how you bring it back in, you then have a better idea of how do you. actually use those emotions in other things that you're doing.

So I think with all of the concentration on music and trying to make music sound better, we're now beginning to realize that we don't actually know as much about voice as we should.