Snoring partner? Help is at hand
There comes a point in many relationships where one just has to say, ‘‘Honey, you know I love you. But you snore like a warthog.’’
So how much would you pay to mute the beast in your bed?
For the past week, I’ve been testing a new gadget from Bose, a company best known for noisecancelling headphones. Its Sleepbuds explore the new frontier of snore-cancelling.
A pair of Sleepbuds will cost you US$250, require you to wear buds inside your ears all night long – and might not work for everyone. They only partly worked for me.
Sleep tech is booming like fitness tech did a few years ago, and Bose is the biggest name yet to try to get into your bed.
I take Bose’s push into sleep seriously because it has a history of engineering rigour and because noise is arguably one of the hardest environmental sleep challenges to fix. Bose’s work on Sleepbuds included a pilot last year on Indiegogo, after which it tweaked its design and sent all those beta testers replacement ear buds. The final version has been available in stores since late June.
Next to my bed, I played an eight-hour recording of someone snoring loudly, while I wore the Sleepbuds to see whether I could still catch some z’s.
Bose wellness category director Brian Mulcahey says the company didn’t use its most well-known tech in the Sleepbuds because to be effective in bed, they needed to be small enough to wear while sleeping (they weigh 1.4 grams) and efficient enough to run all night (up to 16 hours).
Instead, the Sleepbuds use noisemasking tech. The buds seal off your ear canals like earplugs, then the Sleepbuds play additional monotonous sounds that are supposed to make your brain stop paying attention.
You can set an alarm to wake you through the buds.
The Sleepbuds are remarkably comfortable. But despite these smart design choices, we’re still talking about a gadget that lives inside your head.
Will they work for you?
Yes, the Sleepbuds did sufficiently mask the sound of the snoring for both me and my partner. (We had two pairs.) But that doesn’t mean either of us got great sleep. My brain was perturbed just enough by the sound of my own breathing that I couldn’t get into deep sleep.
Bose says I might eventually get used to wearing them. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a sleep-medicine doctor and neurologist who consulted with Bose on developing Sleepbuds, says many learn to sleep with earplugs.
- The Washington Post