French neurotech firm Naox Technologies is turning heads at CES 2026 with a new announcement. The company has revealed Naox Wave, a pair of wireless earbuds that can measure your brain’s electrical activity using electroencephalography, better known as EEG.
EEG is the gold standard for tracking the brain’s electrical signals in clinical settings to study sleep patterns, stress, focus, and neurological conditions.
Traditionally, EEG requires a hospital setup with about 20 electrodes glued to your scalp, but Naox wants to make it something you can wear like normal wireless earbuds and use in everyday life.
Naox’s in-ear approach aims to dramatically simplify that process by placing discreet sensors inside your ear, capturing brain signals passively as you go about your day.
How Naox earbuds turn brain waves into health insights
Naox Wave earbuds work on the same in-ear EEG architecture as Naox Link, a wired, FDA-cleared clinical EEG system that has already been approved for professional use. However, the wireless Wave version is aimed at wellness tracking for consumers, not medical diagnosis.
The system tracks biomarkers like focus, relaxation, alertness, and even indicators related to cognitive patterns. An accompanying app processes this data into easy-to-understand scores and trends, so you can see how your brain activity varies during work, rest, or sleep.
Rather than dumping raw charts on users, the NAOX app turns EEG signals into simple visual summaries and offers guidance, such as breathing exercises or curated audio experiences based on your mental state.
Naox’s broader vision is for this EEG technology to appear in earbuds from other audio brands too, meaning one day your next pair of favorite earbuds could quietly track your brain activity in the background.
The Naox Wave earbuds are expected to begin rolling out toward the end of 2026, with pricing and product details still to come.
Other tech companies are also exploring brain health tracking, with Samsung developing a feature to detect early signs of dementia on its wearables and Timex working on a wearable sensor designed to monitor brain activity rather than just heart rate.
What once was a bulky, clinical process now feels closer to everyday wearable tech, making brain-signal sensing an intriguing new layer of personal wellness tracking.
