Democratizing Earable Computing via Hardware-Software Co-design

Many of us have low-cost earphones that are often forgotten in drawers or discarded as electronic waste. Instead of letting billions of these earphones go to waste, can we transform them into smart earable devices—creating a cost-effective alternative, promoting sustainability, and ultimately democratizing Earable Computing? To answer this question, this paper presents a five-year research roadmap based on a hardware-software co-design approach, with the goal of repurposing low-cost earphones as powerful human-centric sensing devices. We begin with circuit design, develop adaptive signal processing algorithms, and ultimately integrate these efforts into a low-cost, user-friendly earable platform that pushes the boundaries of earable computing field.