Apple’s Hearing Health, Sleep Apnea Features Expand to more places Around the World

Marcus Mendes reports today for 9to5 Mac Apple’s hearing health features for AirPods Pro, including the hearing test and hearing aid functionality, is expanding to more countries. The sleep apnea feature on Apple Watch is seeing similar availability growth.

“Both features were first introduced last year, but they require approval from local health regulators before being rolled out regionally,” Mendes wrote.

Argentina, Australia, Taiwan, and Thailand are but a few locales that received support for both the hearing health and sleep apnea features, according to Mendes. In a delightful little aside, I learned Christmas Island is a real place on Earth and it is one of 15 new places to gain access to both Apple’s hearing health and sleep apnea software.

Apple CEO Tim Cook took to X earlier today to share the news of the expansion. I highlighted his announcement in a post of my own. To reiterate my point, it’s not at all trivial or banal that Cook boast about this ostensibly ho-hum bit of Apple news; on the contrary, it’s a huge deal because of Cook’s stature. He’s one of the highest profile chief executives on the planet—that Cook took time to talk about what’s essentially an accessibility feature is notable. While the hearing health and sleep apnea features have been around for several months here in the United States, any bit of the limelight is worth a thousand suns when it comes to accessibility and, by extension, the disability community. Cook (and others on Apple’s leadership team) post about accessibility other times, but still, every moment is a big. The resonance cannot be overstated.

The hearing health features for AirPods Pro 2 were released to much fanfare last October—alongside the much-ballyhooed (and much-maligned) Apple Intelligence, no less—with iOS 18.1. I posted a first look, as well as an interview with Apple accessibility leader Sarah Herrlinger about building the features a couple months later, in December. As to sleep apnea, I’ve covered that before too, in a story published in February 2023.