Your Android smartphone may soon be able to detect snoring and coughing while you sleep

• Google may be testing a new sleep monitoring feature for Android devices.
• It’s aimed at detecting snores and coughs to get deeper insights to enhance the potential of Google Health Studies.
• The feature is similar to Nest Hub’s Sleep Sensing function.

Google has been expanding its research on digital well-being to build products that support happier and healthier lives. The company is now reportedly testing a way to detect coughs and snores via Android devices to get more in-depth health data and sleep insights.

Google Health Studies rolled out the 2.0 update, supporting a new digital wellbeing study. According to the report, Google Health Studies reveals a ‘sleep audio collection’ study which is exclusively available to Google employees.

According to Google, the Health Sensing team is working on algorithms and sensing capabilities for Android devices to offer deeper and more meaningful insights into user’s sleep. Currently, it is unclear whether the snore or cough detection features will be available to Android devices or exclusive to Pixel smartphones.

The approach to sleep audio collection is similar to how Google Fit uses a camera lens on some Android devices to measure the heart rate. Google’s Nest Hub (2nd gen) already features ‘Sleep Sensing’ that measures breathing and detects disturbing sources such as coughing and snoring. Seems like the company is adding this feature to Android devices.

Google history with digital wellbeing
Since the launch of Google’s Digital Wellbeing in 2018, the company has widened its feature to increase the potential of digital wellbeing. Back in 2020, Google introduced a ‘Bedtime’ hub in Google clock that works in sync with Digital Wellbeing to estimate time spent in bed.

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