A familiar place.
A new possibility.

Why the ear?

In parts of the outer ear, blood vessels lie close to the skin. The canal also gives us a small space where vibrations from the body can register as pressure changes.

Fit matters. A well-fitting eartip can reduce some outside sound and limit how much low-frequency pressure leaks out. That can make subtle signals from inside the body easier to detect.

Synseer is developing four acoustic sensing methods.

Infrasonic pressure sensing listens for slow changes linked to the heartbeat and breathing.

Ultrasonic sensing sends a known sound above the audible band and examines how the sound comes back.

Otoacoustic emissions, or OAE, are faint sounds generated by the inner ear. They help us map how the ear responds to a test sound.

Our fourth method looks at high-frequency acoustic detail. We call it the UHF path. It’s designed to bring finer acoustic detail into the same analysis.

We’re targeting pressure changes as slow as half a hertz and selected acoustic measurements up to twenty thousand hertz. The ultrasonic path explores frequencies above that band.

The advantage comes from looking at the signals together.

Imagine the eartip shifts while you walk. The pressure trace changes. Is that a change in your body, or did the seal move? Synseer is designing the platform to check fit and movement alongside the acoustic signals, and flag portions where the reading is uncertain.

When studying heart timing, we compare ear-based measurements with an independent reference such as ECG. We test how well the readings hold up under different fits and movement conditions.

Synseer’s patent-pending approach combines four ways of listening with checks on what we hear. We’re developing it to gather critical biometric information from the ear as people go about their day.