A new patent from Apple suggests that touch sensors, like those in the iPhone鈥檚 touchscreen, can improve sound quality during a call. The sensors would help to automatically boost or lower the speaker volume depending on how closely the phone is clamped to the ear.
In a published on 30 September, Apple engineer Shaohi Chen proposes using an array of capacitive touch sensors 鈥渄ispersed around the earpiece region鈥� of a phone to take a touch-sensed 鈥渋mprint鈥� of the user鈥檚 ear.
That picture is then compared with standard earprints 鈥� previously determined in lab tests on a wide range of people 鈥� to work out how far from the user鈥檚 eardrum the earpiece is.
Advertisement
Comparison made, the information is used to boost or reduce the volume of the sound produced by the in-phone audio processing circuit 鈥� also taking into account the level of background noise entering the phone鈥檚 mic. 鈥淭his compensates for acoustic leakage between the user鈥檚 ear and the earpiece,鈥� Chen writes in the patent.
Apple touchscreen phones already have a simple touch sensor near the earpiece to disable the phone鈥檚 on-screen keypad when the device is pressed against the head 鈥� although problems with this proximity sensor have been , released earlier this year. Chen says his idea would simply need an array of such sensors arranged in grids so that earprints can be defined as a set of coordinates.
When this article was first posted, it incorrectly stated that Apple鈥檚 patent was filed, rather than published, on 30 September
