When Will Apple Release EEG AirPods?

Imagine walking through a market in Marrakech and talking with vendors in a language you have never studied, your AirPods translating back and forth in your ear as you haggle over spices and ceramics. The latest generation of Apple’s earbuds can already handle live translation, pull off convincing spatial audio, and smooth out the chaos of city noise into something you can live with. For most people, they feel like the final form of wireless headphones. Yet under the plastic, they are still built to do just one thing well: move sound in and out. While on paper, Apple has drawn up something more ambitious, earbuds that do not just listen to the world around you but listen to your body as well.

Some years ago, Apple filed patents describing a biosignal sensing earbud with small electrodes arranged in and around the ear canal, designed to pick up EEG, EMG, EOG, and related signals. While that remains a concept on the patent servers, startups are already turning similar ideas into hardware. NextSense is preparing in-ear EEG Smartbuds for sleep and brain health, Neurable has launched headphones that track your focus, and IDUN is pitching its in-ear EEG as a smartwatch for your brain. If smaller companies can ship EEG earbuds, when might Apple bring similar sensing into AirPods?

Inside Apple's EEG Patent

Patent US20230225659A1, “Biosignal Sensing Device Using Dynamic Selection of Electrodes,” is Apple’s blueprint for EEG-capable earbuds. The filing describes a wearable with a housing, a curved carrier surface, and multiple electrodes distributed across the tip, body, and stem. Altogether, it sketches a future AirPod variant that treats the ear as both a place to deliver sound and as a convenient patch of skin for reading electrical activity from the brain, muscles, eyes, and cardiovascular system.

A schematic from the patent.

The core of the design is how those electrodes are used. Instead of relying on a single metal contact inside the ear tip, the patent proposes a sensor circuit tied to a switching network that can route different subsets of electrodes into the measurement chain. The device can probe which combinations give the cleanest signal for a given person and fit, then stick with that pairing or update it as conditions change. In the claims, EEG, EMG, EOG, cardiac signals, and skin conductance all appear as targets. So the same hardware could, in principle, monitor brain rhythms at night, muscle activity during workouts, and subtle shifts in arousal or stress across the day.

In-ear EEG has moved far enough that this is not just a speculative flourish. Researchers and engineers already treat the ear canal as a serious recording site for sleep, attention, and workload, in part because the skin there gives more stable contact than hair-covered scalp, and because people are used to wearing devices in their ears for hours. IDUN’s Guardian hardware, for example, uses dry electrodes inside an earbud shell to capture EEG without gels, exposing raw signals and basic classifiers for frequency bands, jaw clenches, and eye movements. Systems like this are designed for bedrooms and offices, rather than hospital labs, which shows that continuous in-ear EEG is technically and ergonomically within reach.

NextSense's EEG earbuds.

Around that core, a small cluster of companies is already commercialising the idea. NextSense, spun out of Alphabet’s X, has raised fresh capital to launch wireless Smartbuds that use in-ear EEG for sleep and brain health tracking. Neurable’s MW75 Neuro integrates sensors into a Master & Dynamic headphone, pitching focus tracking and daily cognitive insights on top of noise cancelling. IDUN positions Guardian as a brain smartwatch for developers and researchers, a platform for others to build on. While Apple’s electrodes live in a patent filing, these products are out in the wild, testing whether in-ear and on-ear EEG can work in consumer markets.

Why Do We Need EEG Airpods?

If Apple brought the patent to life, EEG AirPods would almost certainly keep the same basic silhouette as today’s AirPods Pro, with electrodes tucked into the silicone tips and stems instead of sitting on a visible headband. The user experience would therefore only change at the software level. A short calibration routine at setup could test different contact pairs, lock in the cleanest combination for your anatomy, and update that choice over time. The result is that without strapping on a clunky and unfamiliar medical device, you start actively tracking key body and brain signals.

The most straightforward applications of biosensor Airpods sit in health and wellness. At night, in-ear EEG could make sleep staging less of an educated guess and more like the lab-grade signals that NextSense is chasing, potentially supporting features such as slow wave boosting or tailored feedback for people with disrupted sleep. During the day, the same stream could collapse into simple scores for stress and cognitive load, similar in spirit to how Neurable turns raw EEG into a focus timeline instead of a tangle of traces. Over weeks and months, trends in those metrics might help people notice burnout or mood shifts earlier, without claiming to diagnose anything. All of this would fit most naturally inside Apple Health alongside heart rate and heart rate variability.

Beyond health, EEG AirPods would invite Apple to treat brain state as one more context signal for how its products behave. Focus modes could draw not only on calendars and locations, but also on whether your brain looks saturated, tightening or loosening notifications accordingly. Adaptive audio might move between noise cancelling profiles or types of music in response to signs of fatigue, distraction or deep concentration, echoing the idea of neuro-enhanced playlists. And in the novel Vision Pro ecosystem, even a rough sense of workload or emerging motion sickness could help spatial apps back off before users feel overwhelmed.

Will Apple Go All The Way?

For Apple, the upside of moving AirPods into EEG is easy to see. It would extend the health story that began with the Watch, which turned wrist wearables into everyday heart and activity trackers, and push it toward brain state monitoring in a device hundreds of millions of people already use. It would also keep pace with rivals. Meta is exploring neural signals in glasses and wristbands, and a growing group of companies is using ear and over-ear EEG to build new niches in sleep, focus, and mental performance. If in-ear EEG becomes a real platform, Apple has a clear incentive to own that layer inside its ecosystem rather than watch startups define it around them.

However, there are multiple barriers to producing the product. Ear anatomy varies, earbuds move, people sweat, and even with clever electrode selection, it is hard to get stable signals without changing comfort or fit. Continuous biosignal processing also costs battery and compute, two resources AirPods already juggle carefully for audio and connectivity. Reviews of first-generation EEG earbuds and headphones hint at calibration steps, fit kits, and trade-offs that are acceptable for enthusiasts, but would feel out of place in a mass market product that is still judged first on sound quality and ease of use. Apple loves its designs and its user experience, so it would be expected to add sensors only when they do not get in the way of that core experience.

Then there are the questions of governance and time. The line between a wellness feature and a regulated medical device gets blurry once you start talking about brain signals, and regulators are beginning to treat neural data as something that deserves extra protection. A company that has made privacy part of its identity has more to lose if brain-related metrics feel misused or oversold. In the near term, it is simpler to let others test demand while AirPods focus on audio and AI features like translation.

If players like NextSense, Neurable, and IDUN manage to build durable niches over the next few years, Apple will have stronger evidence that EEG belongs in everyday wearables and a clearer sense of how to position it. Given the direction of sensors, software, and policy, some form of brain state sensing in mainstream earbuds feels more likely than not before the end of the decade, but unlikely in the next product cycle. The path from patent figure to shipping feature is long, yet the broader trend is hard to ignore for the undisputed champion of consumer technology.