November 28, 2024
Long-suffering partners fund snore-masking earphones
The wireless headphones are being prototyped and can be worn while you sleep to mask your loved one’s noisy snoring.
PEOPLE have rushed to fund new noise-masking wireless headphones which would help them sleep while their partners are snoring.
Thousands of backers have plunged into a crowdfunding campaign to develop the Sleepbuds, which would help them deal with auditory disturbances at night.
Despite being designed by established audio company Bose, the Sleepbuds are being launched as prototypes on Indiegogo.
The campaign has almost 3,000 backers already and has currently reached 888% of its target $50,000, with $440,000 pledged and 23 days left.
Bose justified the crowdfunding campaign by saying: “We have a lot of experience dealing with noise, and we have a ton of research on how to apply that to sleep, but this is still a new space for us.
“So, we want to validate what we know, and find out what we don’t, by inviting highly motivated lead users – from among the millions worldwide suffering from the massive problem – into our development process.”
The way the Sleepbuds block out common night-time noise disturbances is through what Bose says is “a combination of passively attenuating eartips and Bose engineered masking sounds”.
Noise masking is different from noise cancellation. Cancellation works to effectively create quiet inside the ear canal, but masking – as Bose claims – “creates quiet in our minds”.
These masking sounds will be pre-loaded on the Sleepbuds, which will also be able to work as an alarm to wake users up in the morning.
The IndieGogo pricing puts the Sleepbuds at $250 per pair.
The prototype devices will be sent to the crowdfunding participants in February 2018, with the consumer Sleepbuds expected to be released to the general public later that year. – news.sky.com
