A New Design Paradigm for Enabling Smart Headphonse

Abstract

Headphones continue to grow more intelligent as new functions (e.g., touch-based gesture control) appear. These functions usually rely on auxiliary sensors (e.g., accelerometer and gyroscope) that are available in smart headphones. However, for those headphones that do not have such sensors, supporting these functions becomes a daunting task. This paper presents HeadFi, a new design paradigm for bringing intelligence to all headphones. Instead of adding auxiliary sensors into headphones, HeadFi turns the pair of drivers that are readily available inside all headphones into a versatile sensor to enable new applications, spanning across mobile health, user-interface, and context-awareness. HeadFi works as a plug-in peripheral connecting the headphones and the pairing device (e.g., a smartphone). The simplicity (can be as simple as just two resistors) and small form factor of this design lend itself to be embedded into the pairing device as an integrated circuit. We envision that HeadFi can serve as a vital supplementary solution to existing smart headphone design by directly transforming large amounts of existing "dumb" headphones into intelligent ones.