I used the thinnest noise-cancelling sleep earbuds for two weeks and it had one fascinating statistic

As someone who likes sleep, I’ve tested my fair share of sleep-tracking devices, but I’ve yet to find a pair of sleep earbuds that actually improve my slumber, rather than just adding one more obstacle between me and a good night’s rest.

It’s not an easy job. While the best sleep trackers can take a hands-off approach (apart from in the case of the best smart rings) and simply feed back on how well you napped, sleep earbuds are generally tasked with actually improving your slumber. Some people are wearing them in lieu of reusuable earplugs, such as Loop, with an added audio element. I’ve tested ones with pretty neat features but others that flew too close to the sun, and made sleeping even more of a chore.

I’ve become jaded about a few top brands because of terrible sleep headphones I’ve tested in the past, but my interest was piqued when a new up-and-comer contacted me to test their alternative.

AI health assistant app Fitnexa has released its first physical product, called the SomniPods 3. These are, according to the brand, the thinnest ANC-toting sleep earbuds released so far, and are designed to work hand-in-hand with the app’s various features.

If you’re confused by these being the brand’s first buds, but bearing a ‘3’ – so was I, but I couldn’t find any evidence of the existence of a SomniPods 2. And don’t get these things confused with the SomniBuds, which are also sleep earbuds but from a totally different company.

To test whether Fitnexa could win where other brands have left me cold (and restless), I tested the buds for a few weeks.

Fitnexia SomniPods 3: Price and availability

The SomniPods 3 cost $149.99 wherever you are in the world – when you buy them, it’ll convert the price to your local currency. At the time of reviewing, that’d be about £115 or AU$232, though whenever you read this, your currency’s value compared to the dollar will dictate exactly what it costs.

As I’ve implied, you need to use the Fitnexa app in order to use the SomniPods, but it's free to download and use. Mostly.

By ‘mostly’, I mean that there’s an optional premium mode called Fitnexa Plus which costs $9.99 per month (exactly £7.64 / $15.48 at the time of writing) or $2.99 per week (£2.29 / AU$4.63).

Fitnexa Plus isn’t necessary for using the SomniPods 3, and in fact I didn’t use it to write this feature. If you do sign up, it gets you quite a few extra features like voice input to log your workouts or nutritional intake, much higher-caliber analysis of your blood sugar and nutrition, advice and suggestions on your next meal, personalized recipes and weekly and monthly health reports, amongst other features.

An app-le a day

I ummed and erred about how much to feature the Fitnexa app itself in this feature. While the SomniPods are designed to be one component of the larger health picture of the app, the app isn't strictly my focus during testing – the buds were. That’s possibly for the best, because I had some problems with the app.

At its core, Fitnexa is used as a fitness and health hub. You use it to log every bite you eat, every sip you drink, every workout you do and, with the SomniPods, every second of sleep. Then the app can suggest workouts, give you overviews of your health and give you ideas for meals, all through the interface of a chat box with a creepy-looking AI trainer. You can pick between three trainers, but they all have that drab veneer of an AI image – was it too hard to take photos of three real people?

Some aspects of the app work incredibly well. I was particularly staggered at how smart the food-recognition feature was – I could send a snap of basically any food and the app would recognise what it was, even if it was partly-concealed by a pita or wrap, and give a smart nutritional break-down.

A feature of Fitnexa Plus is that it can help guide your nutrition and diet. As I said, I only used the standard tier of the app (the free one), but if the advice was nutritionally sound, I can see it being a fantastic fitness feature. I love apps that come up with recipe ideas based on what you own, and this is another apparent feature of the app. In general, I’d say for people trying to eat healthier, the app could be great.

But there are some problems too. Naturally, sending every iota of your daily data is a time-consuming process, and I frequently skipped logging glasses of water or snacks because I just couldn’t be bothered. The app was quite buggy, logging me out for no reason and hiding my data until I logged back in. It was an absolute pain to navigate, and I’d have to click randomly around in the hopes of finding the particular menu I was looking for. And if you’re not a subscriber to the app’s premium mode, you can only send a certain number of queries, logs or commands a day. How many? I’ve no idea; it was quite inconsistent in my testing, but Fitnexa’s materials say only one.

Then there are the standard issues with any chatbot that make them so bizarrely inhuman. Lana, the assistant that my app defaulted too, was overwhelmingly positive about every single thing I logged. I don’t need to know that my handful of peanuts was a good snack. And I also didn’t take to how Lana was reactive, responding to my commands and prompts, rather than being proactive and sending me suggestions and urges to exercise or drink water at the right times. I understand that this is how AI works – you need to spend credits to get responses and all that – but it’s not how an actual trainer would work. A drill sergeant, Lana is not.

A dream to wear, or ear-ritating?

So far in this article about the Fitnexa SomniPods 3, I’ve spent ages writing about the app and have barely touched on the sleep earbuds themselves. Let’s change that.

They come in a puck-shaped charging case. I don’t underestimate the artistry of a good charging case, and I’m a fan of both the color and feel of the SomniPods’ offering – it certainly doesn’t feel cheap.

The buds themselves are nice and small, measuring 3.3g each – of course you’d hope so, given Fitnexa’s claims about the buds' size, but it’s good to see that it’s true. They have flared silicon tips, which felt saggy, but I suppose that helps them fit in your ear better, and the box includes a variety of sizes including some non-flared ones.. The buds also have ear wings, which are an extra design feature certain headphones have to keep them wedged in your ear better – again, the box offers a few sizes.

It took me a few nights to find the knack to inserting the SomniPods into my ear – they’re small enough that the correct twisting maneuver takes some attempts. Once in the ear, they’re mostly out of sight and out of mind, and I rarely felt like I could consciously notice them, The buds don’t protrude far, so I could sleep on my side without issue. I’ve tested certain buds where the discomfort of lying on them in certain ways would wake me up, but there’s none of that here.

I must say, that on most nights during the testing process, the SomniPods felt quite loose in my ear, and I sometimes went to sleep worrying about where they’d be when I woke up. On every morning, though, I’d find them where I expected them – in my ear. I suppose it just takes a few weeks of wearing them to get use to how they feel (and the feel never actually affected my sleep at all).

SomniProblems

Wearing the buds is a simple, stress-free experience. Unfortunately, at least during my testing, actually getting them to work wasn’t.

Pairing the buds was simple, but I thought that was all I’d need to do to get them to work. I set them up, popped them in my ears and went to sleep, repeating this process for about four nights in a row. I think it’s important to avoid looking at the results when I test sleep tracking tech, in order to avoid orthosomnia, a situation in which obsessive use of sleep tracking gadgets can have a negative affect on sleep. Obviously that would really skew my testing data, and I avoid it by avoiding looking at my results for the first few days of testing.

This turned out to be a bad idea, because I was nearly a week into my testing when I discovered that the buds hadn’t tracked any of my forty winks. Oops.

When I looked further into the Fitnexa app, and specifically the SomniPods’ page in it, I discovered a slider for ‘Sleep Mode’. I was on Auto, which supposedly detects when you fall asleep and starts the tracking automatically, but in my case it hadn’t done so. Thankfully, there’s an option simply called ‘On’, which guarantees that it’ll track sleep – afterwards in my testing, I made sure to turn this on just before I went to bed every night.

The next problem was that my sleep data wasn’t reliably shared to the app. I’d wake up to find that there was sometimes no data, but historical data was starting to show up. Again, cue more testing and playing about, until I discovered the cure. Sleep data is only shared between the buds and app when they’re paired, but when I put the buds in their case and closed the lid upon waking up, the connection was severed. The data was only fully shared the next night, when I put the buds in my ears. Solving this one was simple – I’d leave the cover of the case open for a few minutes after returning the buds, and when I did this, I finally got my information on the app.

I list this all not to unduly criticize Fitnexa, but to give other owners some suggestions if they’re having trouble with the buds.

Spending a night

So what are the buds actually like to use, when working properly? Well, I’m happy to say that they’re pretty good, although there are still one or two issues.

The buds have a 11-hour battery life, which I’d say is enough for a full night’s rest for most of us. However if you turn on noise cancellation, they only have 5.7 hours in the tank. Because of this I never slept with ANC turned on, as the buds would run out of charge long before I’d wake up. For what it’s worth, I did test their ANC during the day – it’s not Bose-level or anything, but it’s pretty solid and I imagine it’d plaster over gentle background noises during the night, as well as take a dent out of louder annoyances like engineering works or noisy neighbors.

It’s easy for me to say that a better battery life would improve future models of SomniPods, but I’m not sure that’s true. The passive noise cancellation of the buds in my ears was more than enough to stop any sounds around me, and a bigger battery would require a bigger bud – I think I prefer them how they are.

Another potentially-great feature which is lacking, and can be solved pretty easily, is sleep sounds. This is pretty common in sleep earbuds, offering you gentle noise to fall asleep to. But the SomniPods 3 only have four (ocean, rain, wind and white noise), and they’re all incredibly short. I found it quite distracting trying to fall asleep to the sound of rain, when it’d fade to silence and then start the loop again every 20 seconds or so. Other options I’ve tested last a lot longer, or at least have a seamless loop so you don’t know you’re only listening to a half-minute of audio.

What’s curious is that the app has quite a few other sleep sounds, including waterfalls, farm noises and snowy footsteps. You can play these from the app, but it didn’t track my sleep when I did so, and I couldn’t find a way to replace the four on-bud noises with the alternatives in the app. Possibly my error, but I tried hard – if such an option exists, it’s way too well hidden.

What I don’t recall seeing in sleep earbuds before, is an equalizer. These are commonplace in standard earbuds, letting you personalize your audio by bumping up the bass or stripping out the mids, but I was initially surprised to see a 10-band one available in the Fitnexa app alongside some presets. It took me a while to figure out that this is for people who like to fall asleep to their own music, and it’s a neat touch.

The night-time twist

There’s one more thing that you’re expecting me to talk about; I talked about the SomniPods 3 results and then slipped in a whole separate section before even analysing these results! Now, I finally get to explain the headline.

Lots of what the SomniPods track is the kind of metric you normally see in sleep-tracking earbuds. There’s a breakdown of your slumber time in deep sleep, light sleep and waking time, as well as a graph breaking them down over time. It all looked accurate to me, except one or two times when it curiously stopped tracking early.

You of course can also see the duration, and a count of how much of your night was actually spent in bed. For me these were always the same, but if you go to the toilet frequently in the night, this’ll be a really insightful stat.

But the metric I found really fascinating was sleep position. The buds track whether you’re sleeping on your left side, right side, back or front, and even tells you how many times you turned over during the night and per hour.

I haven’t tested every pair of sleep earbuds, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen this before, and it found it fascinating. My turnover rate was nearly identical every night, at about 3 times per hour, and I generally spent about 70% of every night on my right side… all except on one night, which was 92% on my left.

I found it really fascinating to examine these stats, and align them with other factors; whether or not I’d drunk alcohol, whether or not I had a hot water bottle, how late I went to sleep, whether I read before bed or played video games. Honestly, I’m very keen to get scientific about this, and change variables each night while I examine the stats to see how it changes. I only ever tested the buds in my own bed; is the 70/30 ratio my standard or due to something about this crib?

I mentioned earlier in this article orthosomnia, which is when your sleep tracking negatively affects your actual sleep. This is generally linked to negative feelings towards sleep scores or metrics from your tech: wanting to get good numbers in some arbitrary sleep score, or trying to get the exact amount of light or deep sleep that scientists say the average human needs.

To me, interesting metrics like sleep position are a great antithesis to orthosomnia. I’m at no risk of subconsciously trying to maintain my three-flips-per-hour ratio, but instead it’s fostering me to engage with my sleep circumstances in a positive way.

As you no doubt can tell if you’ve read this whole article, I had mixed feelings about Fitnexa’s SomniPods 3. They have a few glaring issues, both in the features they offer and how they operate within the app. But they’re the comfiest and lightest sleep earbuds I’ve ever used, and collect some interesting metrics that pushed me to really think about my sleep.

I can’t say that I’d buy the SomniPods as they are now, but all that stands between them and greatness is software changes – things that are easy for Fitnexa to roll out over the air. Perhaps if your new year’s resolution is to sleep better, they’ll be ready in time for them.

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