New Apple study shows how your AirPods might one day double as an AI heart monitor

The Apple Research team has published a pretty interesting study that investigated whether AI models can estimate heart rate from stethoscope recordings, even though they weren’t specifically trained with that purpose in mind. The short answer is: yes. And this is great news. Here’s why. In a nutshell, the team took six popular foundation models trained on audio or speech, and tested how well their internal audio representations could be used to estimate heart rate from heart sound recordings, or phonocardiograms. The thing is: even though these models weren’t designed for health data, the results were surprisingly solid. Most models performed just as well as older methods that rely on handcrafted audio features, which are manually engineered ways to represent sound and have long been used in traditional machine learning models. But the most interesting part? Apple’s own in-house model, a version of CLAP (Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining) trained internally on 3 million audio ... Read full article.