Wearable Self-Tracking Tool Listens for Yawns, Coughs, and Munches
Speech recognition has gotten sophisticated, but spoken words aren’t the only revealing noises people make. We also cough, laugh, grunt, grind teeth, breathe hard, and make other sounds that can provide clues to mood and health.

Now researchers at Cornell have built a system designed to detect body noises other than speech. The system consists of a microphone that attaches behind the user’s ear, and someday could be built into the frame of a device like Google Glass. By picking up sound waves transmitted through the skull, it can detect subtle clues about the activity or emotional state of the person wearing it—when he or she is eating, for example, or has a cold—and could make devices that track fitness or health much more accurate.
“We see ‘quantified self’ and health tracking taking off, but one unsolved problem is how to track food consumption in an automated way,” says Tanzeem Choudhury, who led the research. “This can reliably detect the onset of eating and how frequently are you eating.”
If used in enough smartphones, Choudhury’s technology might measure the health of a city. “This could be a bridge between tracking pollution and coughing and other respiratory sounds to get a better measure of how pollution is affecting the population,” she says.
Such technology also could be combined with other methods of ambient sensing in smartphones. Motorola’s latest handset, the Moto X, includes a chip that constantly listens for certain keywords (see “The Era of Ubiquitous Listening Dawns”) to determine what the phone’s owner is doing.
Rana el Kaliouby, cofounder of Affectiva, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based company that makes software that can read people’s faces to detect their emotions, says the Cornell technology could help with both mood-sensing and health. “I like their focus on nonspeech body sounds. We know from our work that these are very important and telling,” she says.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?
Robot vacuum companies say your images are safe, but a sprawling global supply chain for data from our devices creates risk.
A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate
Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023
These exclusive satellite images show that Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi megacity is well underway
Weirdly, any recent work on The Line doesn’t show up on Google Maps. But we got the images anyway.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.