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Millions of Americans struggle to fall or stay asleep. For some, sticking some new gadgets in their ears might be worth trying.
Earbuds meant to be worn in bed aren't exactly new. The first popular models rolled out in 2018, and most models available right now let you listen to podcasts or soothing sounds until you fall asleep. But a smarter generation of "sleep buds" is set to arrive, and the products embrace new tricks - from tracking your motion to measuring your brain waves - to make sure you conk out.
Devices such as smartwatches and rings only monitor your sleep, said Seungpyo Noh, CEO of an upstart sleep tech company called dbbeats. Existing sleep buds, meanwhile, mostly play audio all night.
"Our target is to combine these two products into one product," he said in an interview.
Noh, like the rest of the start-up's co-founders, worked for years at Korean electronics giant LG Electronics, before striking out to tackle sleep problems like the ones he often faces.
To do that, the team developed its first product - called the For Me Buds - to measure a user's heart rate from inside their ears and play a combination of soothing, custom-made ambient sound and binaural beats in hopes of getting people to fall asleep faster. Once the wearer falls asleep, the earbuds use the heart rate and motion data as a signal to shut off the sound.
In some cases, Noh said, people who spent upward of an hour tossing and turning before nodding off saw their "sleep latency" shrink to about 30 minutes. Because the $199 For Me Buds can track a user's heart activity, Noh said, they can detect when someone wakes up in the middle of the night and start playing that peaceful audio again.
To Jonathan Berent, a former Google X director now at the helm of NextSense - another company developing an ambitious set of sleep buds - sussing out your brain activity is the way forward.
The goal, he said, isn't just to keep people asleep longer. It's to heighten the impact of the time we spend in bed.
The company's Tone Buds, which cost $299 with a preorder or $349 when they go on sale later this year, come with electrodes meant to directly monitor brain activity throughout the night.
As your brain waves shift, the company claims, the earbuds will play specific sounds meant to tug you into deeper stages of sleep. Once your brain is experiencing deep, or N3, sleep, Berent said, the Tone Buds will play "bursts" of pink noise - a waterfall-like sound that, according to some studies, can improve memory and prolong the amount of deep sleep we experience.
Don't expect to feel miraculously refreshed after your first night, though - according to Berent, these slumber-inducing sounds will take a while to ramp up.
"We'll play these tones and frequencies at very low volumes at first," he said. "The last thing we want to do is disrupt sleep, and so we're going to tell users to expect results in seven to 14 days."
But what do the sleep experts say?
"There does seem to be some evidence that perhaps [these devices] can pick up signals we haven't been able to see previously, and I do think they're becoming more and more capable," said Greta Raglan, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School and faculty member at the Michigan Medicine Sleep Disorders Center. "That being said, I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence to back up the shifting in tones and things like that to improve sleep quality."
Jamie Zeitzer, co-director of Stanford University's Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences, largely agreed.
"Can binaural beats change brainwave activity? Sure," he said of the claims about the For Me Buds. "Does that actually help you sleep better? That's less clear."
Zeitzer, who consulted with NextSense's Berent when he was still at Google X, takes a slightly sunnier view of the science at play in the start-up's Tone Buds - but even he doesn't think they will help everyone. In particular, he said, research suggests that the company's pink-noise process may be more helpful for older people than for their younger counterparts.
That doesn't mean gadgets like these that claim to help your sleep will not help - they actually might. But maybe not for the reasons you would expect.
Very few things have proved to make someone sleep better despite themselves, Zeitzer said. But he and Raglan agree that because sleep is inherently a psychological phenomenon, thinking that something will help may mean it actually will. Both say devices such as these are worth trying, but if they really do help, it's "generally because of a person's belief."
You have some time to figure out if you believe in these products or not, because neither of them is quite done yet. Noh's company has presold about 3,000 pairs through a recent crowdfunding campaign, and he expects to begin fulfilling those orders in March.
NextSense, meanwhile, is busy figuring out its subscription model before launching in the coming months - a necessity, because the specialized, electrode-laden ear tips need to be replaced regularly.
Before you even consider spending your hard-earned money on some new sleep gadgets, Raglan added, be sure to try one thing first.
"If you are in bed and you're not asleep, and you're struggling or you're feeling anxious, the best thing you can do for yourself is to get out of bed, and do something quiet, calm and comfortable in low light until you start to feel sleepy again," she said.
"Our motto is that beds are for sleep and sex, and nothing else."