Hush smart earplugs block out everything except your phone ringer

There are a lot of reasons for wanting to wear earplugs, one of the most popular being able to sleep without all that irritating ambient noise disturbing you. But they’re rather indiscriminate with what they block out, and the same plugs that block out the nearby dual carriageway could also block out the alarm on your phone.

Thankfully Hush is working around that, since they’re a pair of smart earplugs that wirelessly connect to your smartphone so that you can still hear the ringer  without having to listen to the rest of the racket going on in the area around your bedroom.

The best way to describe them is as noise cancelling earplugs, since they generate noise to prevent you from hearing everything else — just like noise cancelling headphones. The difference being that they’re actually designed to let you move and roll sleep without the risk of them breaking. Just in case you were worrying about the power issue, the whole package does include a case that charges the earplugs for you and holds enough power so that a fully charged case can charge the earplugs up to ten times before you need to plug it in again.

Now many of you might not want to hear your phone after you plan on sleeping, which is why Hush comes with a built-in notification filter that prevents you from being bombarded with spam when you want to go to sleep. Since nobody really phones each other unless its important any more, setting it to only forward phone calls is a great way to only be disturbed when absolutely necessary. They also have an alarm built-in, so you don’t have to rely on the one on your phone if you don’t want to.

So what’s the catch? Well one pair of these things will set you back $115/£74 if you get them through Kickstarter. That seems like a lot, but they’re actually going to cost $145/£93 when they go on general sale. They aren’t cheap, but if regular old earplugs just don’t cut it for you then you might want to look into Hush as an alternative. Just don’t lose them!

Tom Pritchard