'Earprint' touch sensors to improve sound quality in iPhones

London, Oct 1 (ANI): A new Apple patent suggests that touch sensors, like those in the iPhone's touchscreen, can improve sound quality during a call.

Apple engineer Shaohi Chen proposed using an array of capacitive touch sensors "dispersed around the earpiece region" of a phone to take a touch-sensed "imprint" of the user's ear, reports New Scientist.

The sensors would help to automatically boost or lower the speaker volume depending on how closely the phone is clamped to the ear.

That picture is then compared with standard earprints to work out how far from the user's eardrum the earpiece is.

Post-comparison, the information is used to boost or reduce the volume of the sound produced by the in-phone audio processing circuit - also taking into account the level of background noise entering the phone's mic.

"This compensates for acoustic leakage between the user's ear and the earpiece," Chen wrote in the patent. (ANI)