Apple could still be working on a game-changing fitness feature for the AirPods that could completely change how you work out, as a patent has reemerged hinting at an exciting new feature.
Pose detection (which we covered when it last surfaced in 2022 and in 2020) could detect the position of your head during a workout and offer audio guidance to help improve your form or position during exercise. This could help reduce the risk of injury due to incorrect positioning and help optimize exercise through proper form.
We discovered the patent for a "Wireless Ear Bud System with Pose Detection" granted to Apple on May 6, 2025. A previous version of the patent was released on May 11, 2023, by the U.S. Patent Office. It was first filed back in 2018. The new version builds on the previous one with some new information and tweaks.
The previous patent shows that Apple has been working on this feature for some time, though we haven't seen it implemented in AirPods models yet.
Inventions and features don't always come to fruition, but Apple's continually reissuing and tweaking this one suggests it could see the light of day.
"Ear buds may have sensors to gather orientation information such as accelerometer measurements during user movements. A host electronic device may communicate wirelessly with the ear buds and may form part of an ear bud system that supplies the user with coaching and feedback while evaluating user performance of a head movement routine or other exercise routine," reads the patent's text.
Basically, when you move your head a certain way, the AirPods would be aware of the movement and could check to see if the movement is correct based on the exercise you're performing. Position is checked "using a user head pose look-up table to categorize measured user head positions as corresponding to respective user head poses."
Again, this is just a patent and there's no guarantee the feature will ever materialize in a pair of AirPods, but with as much work as Apple appears to have put into the feature over the last eight or more years, I do think we could see if at some point and it might just change the way AirPods users exercise.
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