These Bengaluru boys ‘tricked’ Apple’s operating system for AirPod jugaad to give granny hearing aids | Bengaluru News

A few days ago, when 24-year-old Rithwik Jayasimha heard the news that Apple had introduced a hearing aids feature in their new AirPods Pro 2 earbuds, he was elated. Along with his father, he went to the market and bought a pair for his grandmother. However, after coming back home, his excitement soon gave way to disappointment.
“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.
As he found out later, India was one of the several countries that hadn’t approved the feature yet, and it was anybody’s guess when the approval might come. Over 100 countries have allowed the feature so far, after the US Food and Drug Administration gave its nod in September.
However, instead of giving up, Jaysimha decided to find a solution. The very next day, he met his school friends Arnav Bansal and Rithvik Vibhu, who felt deeply about the issue too as their grandmothers were also users of hearing aids.
In a lab in Bengaluru’s Koramangala, the trio began brainstorming over a question: how do they trick the device into thinking it was in the US, and not India, in order to enable the feature?
The AirPods, like many tech devices today, do not have GPS, but determine locations through scraping the surroundings for ‘SSIDs’, or service set identifiers/names attached to a Wi-Fi network when a router is set up.
In order to block the AirPods from detecting the location, the boys knew they had to block it from reading the Wi-Fi signals around them, and feed different SSIDs that led elsewhere. “We’re all self-confessed nerds. I didn’t even go to college, but I have always been fascinated by technology,” says Bansal, proudly displaying on a Zoom call the model they built to execute their mission.
Using aluminum 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, is a device that 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’, or tricked Apple’s operating system into locating the device in San Francisco, and enabled the feature.
They then gifted the AirPods to their grandmas. “The old hearing aids that my grandma had were professional ones. They were very pricey, and yet very clunky. She is a patient of Parkinson’s disease and it was really difficult for her to operate them,” says Bansal.
Jayasimha chimes in too. “Earlier, we had to take hearing aids 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 that you don’t find in hearing aids,” he adds.
The boys soon realised that they were not 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, under their lab (called ‘Lagrange Point’), they will continue to work on projects that use technology to solve civic issues, says Bansal.
Some of the things they have already made so far are watercooled suits to help delivery personnels navigate heatwaves, and clothing that makes it easier for Parkinsons’ patients to wear them. Now, they’re onto the next challenge: building devices to detect microplastics in water and food.