Google plans to track your coughs, snores using your Android phone

Google, last year, rolled out two new features on its Pixel smartphones that use the phone’s cameras and the Google Fit app to measure users’ heart and respiratory rates. Now, word is that the company is working on developing a feature that will track users’ coughs and snores using their Pixel phones and/or Android smartphones.

9To5 Google, in an APK teardown of the latest update of the Google Health Studies app, revealed that the company is testing on-device snore and cough detection features on Pixel and Android smartphones. These new features are a part of a ‘Sleep Audio Collection’ study that is available only to Google employees at the moment. The study requires the participants to be a full time Google employee with an Android phone. The Environmental conditions required for this study include having one adult sleeper in the same room who does not work for a competitor company.

Google, in the study, explained that its Health Sensing team is working on an advanced suite of sensing capabilities for Android devices with the aim of providing users with meaningful insight into their sleeping pattern. The two features, that is, snore detection and sleep detection, are expected to be available on supported Android and Pixel phones as ‘bedside monitoring’ features and they are expected to work on-device in a ‘privacy preserving’ manner. Meaning, all the data collected as a part of these features will be recorded and processed on users’ smartphones without the data ever being transmitted to Google Cloud.

As far as availability is concerned, it remains unclear if Google will make its cough detection and snore detection features available on both its Pixel phones and all the phones powered by its Android mobile operating system. At the very least, these features are likely to available on Pixel phones first, as it did with its heart rate and respiratory rate detection features, before broadly being available on Android smartphones.

Another possibility that the publication reports is the features being available on the upcoming Nest Tablet, which as per reports is expected to be a smart display docked on top a speaker using pogo pins. That said, Google hasn’t divulged too many details about these features but we will keep an eye out in case it does.

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