Health Monitoring with Earables: A Survey

Health monitoring is a critical component of modern healthcare, requiring continuous or periodic measurement of physiological parameters to accurately assess personal health status. Advances in wearable technology have significantly improved the accessibility and convenience of such monitoring. Among various form factors, earables offer unique advantages: they can capture rich biosignals, provide stable and motion-resistant measurements, ensure long-term comfort, maintain discreteness, and integrate seamlessly with everyday audio functionalities. By investigating the latest technological advances and application cases in ear-worn devices, this survey reviews the current state of earable technology in health monitoring, identifies gaps and opportunities, and suggests directions for future research and development. We first explore the multifaceted role of earables in health monitoring, including measurement of physiological parameters, activity monitoring, and healthcare applications. We then summarize the challenges of robustness, context-awareness, and signal fidelity, and outline six future directions-dynamic monitoring, context-aware processing, multimodal fusion, semantic activity understanding, personalized adaptation, and explainable AI-to advance earable health monitoring.