Bengaluru Innovators Transform AirPods into Hearing Aids for Grandmothers | Bengaluru News – Times of India

A few days ago, when 24-year-old Rithwik Jayasimha heard that Apple had introduced a hearing aid feature in its new AirPods Pro 2, he was elated. Along with his father, he went to the market and bought a pair for his grandmother. However, on coming back home, his excitement soon gave way to disappointment.
“When I tried to set it up, I realised the feature was blocked in India. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to enable it, but I kept hitting a dead end,” said Jayasimha. As he found out later, India was one of the several countries that hasn’t approved the feature in AirPods yet, though over 100 countries have allowed it after the US food and drug administration gave its nod in Sept.
However, instead of giving up, Jayasimha decided to find a solution. The very next day, he met his school friends Arnav Bansal and Rithwik Ribhu, who felt deeply about the issue too as their grandmothers are also hearing-aid users. At a lab in Koramangala, the trio began brainstorming over a question: How do they trick the device into thinking it was in the US and not in India, in order to enable the feature?
The AirPods, like many tech devices today, don’t have GPS but determine location through scraping the surroundings for ‘SSIDs’, or service set identifiers/names attached to a Wi-Fi network when a router is set up. To block the AirPods from detecting the location, the youngsters knew they had to block it from reading Wi-Fi signals and feed different SSIDs that led elsewhere.
“We’re all self-confessed nerds. I didn’t even go to college, but I’ve always been fascinated by technology,” said Bansal, proudly displaying on a Zoom call the model the trio built to execute their mission. Using aluminium foil, copper mesh, a microwave, and an ESP 32 chip (which comes with integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), they built a ‘Faraday Cage’. The cage, named after scientist Michael Faraday who first built it in 1836, blocks electromagnetic fields. The microwave was key to the process: After all, in order to function, these appliances use electromagnetic waves with frequency of 2.4 GHz, the same as Wi-Fi signals, effectively jamming the latter. Then, they used an open source Wi-Fi location database and executed their ‘geo-spoofing’ — tricking Apple’s operating system into locating the device in San Francisco — and enabled the hearing aid feature.
Then they gifted the AirPods to their grandmothers. “The old hearing aid my grandma had was a professional one. It was very pricey and yet very clunky. She is a patient with Parkinson’s disease and it was really difficult for her to operate it,” said Bansal.
“Earlier, we had to take hearing aid to an audiologist to get it tweaked, which is a huge pain, especially when people are wheelchair-bound. With these AirPods, I just sat there with equaliser settings and made the sound louder, softer, brighter. It’s also more intelligent and has a bunch of features you just won’t get in hearing aids, like conversation awareness,” chimed in Jayasimha.
The boys soon realised they weren’t alone in having these experiences. Ever since the self-taught hackers shared their experiment online, their inboxes have been flooded with requests. They’ve already helped over 30 people tweak their earbuds to enable the feature. Some have even come to their lab — which might need to move to a more ‘official’ setup beyond their home soon, they admit —to get their devices set up. While Apple hasn’t reached out to them yet, they hope the feature receives regulatory approval in India soon.
In the meantime, in their lab (called ‘Lagrange Point’), they will continue to work on projects that use technology to solve civic issues, said Bansal. Some of the things they have already made are watercooled suits to help delivery personnel navigate heatwave, and clothing that makes it easier for Parkinson’s patients to wear them. Now, they’re on to the next big challenge: Building devices to detect microplastics in water and food.