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

Date:
Sat, 20 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Description:
Meet the Fitnexa SomniPods 3. They have some problems but look beyond them, and you'll find smartly-framed buds with a few interesting twists.

FULL STORY ======================================================================

As someone who likes sleep, Ive tested my fair share of sleep-tracking devices, but Ive 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 nights rest.

Its 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. Ive tested ones with pretty neat features but others that flew too close to the sun, and made sleeping even more of a chore.

Ive become jaded about a few top brands because of terrible sleep headphones Ive 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 apps various features.

If youre confused by these being the brands first buds, but bearing a 3 so was I, but I couldnt find any evidence of the existence of a SomniPods 2.
And dont get these things confused with the Somni Buds , 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 (Image credit: Future)

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

As Ive 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 theres 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 isnt necessary for using the SomniPods 3, and in fact I didnt
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 (Image credit:
Future)

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. Thats 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, Id 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 couldnt 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 Id have to click randomly around in the hopes of finding the particular menu I was looking for. And if youre not a subscriber to the apps premium mode, you can only send a certain number of queries, logs or commands a day. How many? Ive no idea; it was quite inconsistent in my testing, but Fitnexas 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 dont need to
know that my handful of peanuts was a good snack. And I also didnt 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 its not how an actual trainer would work. A drill sergeant, Lana is not. A dream to wear, or ear-ritating? (Image credit: Future)

So far in this article about the Fitnexa SomniPods 3, Ive spent ages writing about the app and have barely touched on the sleep earbuds themselves. Lets change that.

They come in a puck-shaped charging case. I dont underestimate the artistry
of a good charging case, and Im a fan of both the color and feel of the SomniPods offering it certainly doesnt feel cheap.

The buds themselves are nice and small, measuring 3.3g each of course youd hope so, given Fitnexas claims about the buds' size, but its good to see that its 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 theyre small enough that the correct twisting maneuver takes some attempts. Once in the ear, theyre mostly out of sight and out of mind, and I rarely felt like I could consciously notice them, The buds dont protrude far, so I could sleep on my side without issue. Ive tested certain buds where the discomfort of lying on them in certain ways would wake me up, but theres 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 theyd be when I woke up. On every morning, though, Id 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 (Image credit: Future)

Wearing the buds is a simple, stress-free experience. Unfortunately, at least during my testing, actually getting them to work wasnt.

Pairing the buds was simple, but I thought that was all Id 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 its 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 hadnt 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 hadnt done so. Thankfully, theres an option simply called On, which guarantees that itll 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 wasnt reliably shared to the app. Id 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 theyre 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 Id 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 theyre having trouble with the buds. Spending a night (Image credit: Future)

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

The buds have a 11-hour battery life, which Id say is enough for a full
nights 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 Id wake up. For what its worth, I did test their ANC during the day its not Bose-level or anything, but its pretty solid and I imagine itd plaster over gentle background noises during the night, as well as take a dent out of louder annoyances like engineering works or noisy neighbors.

Its easy for me to say that a better battery life would improve future models of SomniPods, but Im not sure thats 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 theyre all incredibly short. I found it
quite distracting trying to fall asleep to the sound of rain, when itd fade
to silence and then start the loop again every 20 seconds or so. Other
options Ive tested last a lot longer, or at least have a seamless loop so you dont know youre only listening to a half-minute of audio.

Whats 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 didnt track my sleep when I did so, and I couldnt 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, its way too well hidden.

What I dont 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 its a neat touch. The night-time twist (Image credit: Future)

Theres one more thing that youre 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. Theres 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, thisll be a really insightful stat.

But the metric I found really fascinating was sleep position. The buds track whether youre 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 havent tested every pair of sleep earbuds, but I cant say Ive 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. (Image credit: Future)

I found it really fascinating to examine these stats, and align them with other factors; whether or not Id 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, Im 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. Im at no risk of subconsciously trying to maintain my three-flips-per-hour ratio, but instead its fostering me to engage with my sleep circumstances in a positive way.

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

I cant say that Id 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 years resolution is to sleep better, theyll be ready in time for them.

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/health-fitness/sleep/i-used-the-thinnest-noise-cance lling-sleep-earbuds-for-two-weeks-and-it-had-one-fascinating-statistic


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