Pixel and Android phones could soon detect when you snore or cough because why not

The second-generation Nest Hub in the past has added many health tracking features including the ability to detect when you’re snoring when noise occurs in your environment while you sleep, and well, how you’re sleeping overall. This is possible because the device’s sensors capture and process information securely on the device without sending anything to the cloud and make determinations about your wellbeing.

Now, according to a recent 9to5Google APK Insights of the Google Health Studies app for Android reveals that these features may, in fact, be coming to Pixel phones and other handsets as well. Apparently, a new digital wellbeing study discusses a “Sleep Audio Collection” that’s only available to Googlers. “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”, the text states.

Google told 9to5 that its Health Sensing team is working on a set of tools for Android devices that can provide users with “meaningful insights” about their sleep by giving them data to validate, tune, and develop algorithms. Basically, this means that Google is creating sensing capabilities and algorithms and baking them into phones so users can gain better control over their physical health.

This is nothing new though, and it’s excellent to see more work being done in this area. For a long time, Google has provided a Digital Wellbeing dashboard on Android to help users track how much time they’re spending on screens, and does the same for Family Link supervised accounts. Additionally, it has built heart and respiratory tracking into Google Fit and that simply uses your camera to take readings.

My final thought on this is that it’s amazing to me what smartphones have become capable of, and there seems to be virtually no limit to the innovative use cases for handsets. The only thing that keeps them from being infinitely useful is their battery restrictions and the fact that you’re looking at everything through a small rectangle in your hands – all things that could one day be solved with AR and VR as well as alternate battery research projects.