Soundcore's new sleep earbuds put an optical heart rate sensor inside your ear.
Soundcore unveiled the Sleep Earbuds 4 Pro at IFA 2026. Gadgets & Wearables reported that they arrive in November at $349.99 in the US and 299.99 pounds in the UK.
The sensor is a 100 Hz optical PPG. That is the same green-light pulse reader a smartwatch presses against your wrist, moved into the ear canal. It records your pulse through the night, and Soundcore says it can produce heart rate, changes in heart rate variability, sleep stages, sleep quality and breathing-related patterns from that. In the morning you get a report with a Sleep Score and a figure it calls Body Battery. None of it makes the earbuds a medical device, and nobody outside the company has tested the accuracy.
What it removes is the watch. Anyone who straps one on at bedtime purely to collect overnight numbers now has a reason to stop.
Playing audio stored on the buds themselves stretches that to 9.5 hours, or 14.5 hours without cancellation.
The case is doing as much work as the buds. The SleepHub case carries an AMOLED touchscreen, its own processor and local storage. You can switch modes, set an alarm, pick a stored soundscape and read the morning report without picking up a phone. The audio lives on the case as well, so the earbuds play with no internet connection at all.
The regular Sleep Earbuds 4 land a month earlier, in October, at $229.99. They give up the in-ear sensor, the detailed sleep tracking and the touchscreen case. Their case can also listen to the room, recognise a sound like a baby crying or a fire alarm, and turn the masking audio down when it hears one. The $349.99 model can't do that.
Noise handling is the older half of the product and it has been sharpened. There is passive isolation, active noise cancellation, and snore masking that shifts its frequency, volume and rhythm as the snoring beside you changes rather than looping one fixed sound.
Each bud weighs about three grams, and the area touching your ear is 20 percent smaller than on the Sleep A30. For something you lie on all night, that number does more work for the product than any of the sensing does.
Battery is quoted at eight hours of Bluetooth streaming with noise cancellation running and eleven hours with it off. Playing audio stored on the buds themselves stretches that to 9.5 hours, or 14.5 hours without cancellation. The case charges wirelessly.
At $349.99 these sit above the QuietOn 4 and above SomniPods 3, and $120 above Soundcore's own cheaper pair. The cheaper pair is the one that turns its masking down when the smoke alarm goes off.