Google may soon have the ability to detect if users snore or cough in their sleep. The search giant is reportedly working on those two built-in features for Pixel and Android.
Publication 9to5Google spotted lines of code in the installation file of the Google Health Studies app. It revealed that the company is conducting a study called ‘Sleep Audio Collection’ that is only available to Google employees.
“You must be a Full Time Googler with an Android phone to participate in this study. Environmental conditions required for this study are to have no more than one adult sleeper in the same room who does not work for a competitor company.” explained Google. With the experiment, Google is working to collect the necessary data to bring an advanced suite of sensing capabilities and algorithms that could be available on Android.
The cough and snore sensing capabilities will reportedly work as sleep tracking feature for users and will monitor the said metrics during sleep. Google said that the function will work in a privacy-preserving, on-device manner which means that the collected data will be safely processed and stored on the phone locally.
Snore and Noise detection is already available on Fitbit Sense and Versa 3 as well as the second-generation Nest Hub.
At the moment, it remains unclear whether the cough and snore detection will be a Pixel-exclusive feature or if it will be available on wide Android devices. The feature is said to have many advantages, especially for people who battle sleep apnea