Bengaluru: Using aluminium foil, copper mesh, a microwave, etc, a 24-year-old man in Bengaluru turned Apple AirPods 2 earbuds into a hearing aid for his grandmother. The story began when Rithwik Jayasimha bought a pair of Apple earbuds for his grandmother. He later realised that the hearing aid feature that the company flaunts was not enabled in India yet. But Jayasimha took this as a challenge, and transformed the device into a hearing aid.“When I tried to set it up, I realised that the feature was blocked in India. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to enable it, but kept hitting a dead end,” says Jayasimha, reported by .Despite that, he was determined to find a solution for this so he called two of his friends, and worked in a lab set up in Bengaluru’s Koramangala. The trio started with a simple question: How will they trick the device to think that the location is US, and not India.They realised that AirPods do not detect GPS but work on scraping the surroundings for ‘SSIDs’, or service set identifiers/names attached to a Wi-Fi network when a router is set up.

How Did They Do It? With that in mind, the trio collected copper mesh, a microwave, aluminum foil, and an ESP 32 chip (which comes with integrated Wi-Fi and bluetooth), they built a ‘Faraday Cage’. Named after the the scientist Michael Faraday, this device blocks electromagnetic fields. The microwave played a key role in the process, as it uses electromagnetic waves at a frequency of 2.4 GHz. This is the same as Wi-Fi signals, which effectively blocked them. Then they used an open-source Wi-Fi location database and carried out a process called ‘geo-spoofing’. Now, this fooled operating system of Apple into believing that the location was not India but San Francisco. And Voila! The feature was unlocked and ready to use. “The old hearing aids my grandma used were professional ones, very expensive but bulky. She has Parkinson's disease, so using them was difficult for her,” says Bansal. Jayasimha adds, “Before, we had to take the hearing aids to an audiologist to adjust them, which was a real hassle, especially for people in wheelchairs. With these AirPods, I could just sit down, adjust the equaliser, and make the sound louder, softer, or clearer. They also have smarter features that you won’t find in regular hearing aids.”