Earbuds that adapt to your brain rhythms.Sleep better. Relax better. Focus better. Feel better.
The RundownNextSense Smartbuds use clinical-grade EEG sensors to detect your brainwaves in real time, and respond with audio that helps you achieve your desired mental state, such as better sleep or deep meditation. Track your mind as it shifts, experience deeper recovery, and explore a new interface to the brain.
- 01EEG sensors that monitor brain activity in realtime
- 02Sounds that adapt to your brain to enhance wellbeing
- 03Dynamic experiences to support sleep, meditation, and more
- 04Premium audio drivers and built-in mic for everyday listening: calls, podcasts, music, and more
Why EEG in earbuds is hard, and why it matters.
For decades, measuring brain activity meant visiting a lab: roughly 20 wet electrodes glued to a scalp, hours of setup, and a technician watching screens. Useful for medicine, useless for daily life. Consumer "brain-sensing" wearables have spent the last decade trying to bridge that gap with headbands, helmets, forehead patches. Most of these products sacrificed signal quality for form factor, ending up neither comfortable enough to wear nor accurate enough to be clinically meaningful.
NextSense's bet: the ear as a window to the brain. The ear canal turns out to be a remarkable place to sense brain activity. It's a stable pocket, just inches from the brain, with no hair to push through. On top of that, many people already wear earbuds for hours a day, so the sensor fits seamlessly into existing habits.
Most exciting of all: the ear is a powerful channel for neuromodulation, the ability to shift one's mental state. People already use audio to change how they feel every day (think: music that lifts your mood or helps you focus). Smartbuds does this while sensing at the same time, so those shifts in cognitive and emotional state can be tracked and tuned with precision.
NextSense ear-EEG captured 86.4% of focal seizures detected by traditional clinical methods — with a false alarm rate of just 0.1 per day.
What's actually in there.
A closed-loop, brain-to-sound interface.
Most sleep wearables run open-loop: they collect data, generate a score in the morning, and leave the rest to you. Smartbuds run closed-loop — the brain signal feeds an audio response in real time, and the response feeds back into the next reading.
Read
Six in-ear EEG sensors capture electrical activity from the brain through the ear canal. Two channels stream at 1,000 Hz to an onboard signal processor.
Classify
On-device machine learning identifies what state your brain is in with accuracy validated against polysomnography, the medical gold standard for sleep staging.
Respond
When the system detects you're entering slow-wave sleep, it delivers timed pink-noise pulses synchronized to your brain's slow oscillations — a technique called closed-loop auditory stimulation, shown in peer-reviewed studies to enhance deep sleep quality and next-day memory.
Adapt
The audio adjusts continuously as your sleep architecture shifts through the night. When you're deep, it goes quiet. When you're surfacing, it pulls you back down. When you wake naturally, it ends.
In a controlled beta period of 106 nights, Smartbuds increased slow-wave activity — the marker most closely tied to physical recovery and memory consolidation.
Brain interfaces, finally in something people will actually wear.
Consumer neurotechnology has been "five years away" for fifteen years. Earlier attempts — Muse, Dreem, OpenBCI, the now-retired Philips SmartSleep — proved the science but stalled on form factor. People won't sleep in a headband. They won't strap something to their forehead. The category needed a chassis that disappears into existing daily behavior.
Earbuds are that chassis. People already wear them for hours a day. Pairing clinical EEG with a familiar form factor is the missing piece that turns brain-computer interface from a research toy into a wearable category. Sleep is the first application because it has the clearest signal and largest market — but the underlying platform supports relaxation, focus, and mood states, with ongoing research collaborations exploring clinical applications.
Spun out of Alphabet's X (Google's moonshot lab) in 2020, NextSense raised an oversubscribed $16M Series A led by Ascension Ventures, with Satori Neuro and Corundum Neuroscience Fund. The founding team includes neuroscientists, engineers, and clinicians from the Google Health sleep research program.
A new interface to the brain.
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