An Israeli company has raised more than £150,000 from members of the public for a new product that neutralises the sound of snoring.

Silent Partner is an electronic "smart patch" that sticks to either side of your nose and senses what your snore sounds like, then cancels out the noise with an inverted sound wave.

For anyone sleeping nearby, the technology - which significantly reduces the offending sound for anyone lying as close as 20cm to the wearer - could be a precious gift.

Netanel Eyal, a 31-year-old electrical engineer from Jerusalem, came up with the idea around five years ago, when a relative of his snored so loudly that he worried they had breathing problems. And since his family member was not alone - around 15 million Britons and 90 million Americans snore - it was still on his mind when he left Hewlett Packard's postgraduate programme in 2013.

According to him, the device, which he has spent a year working on and is due to be sold in November, will "change people's lives" - and with more than 3,300 backers, it appears the public thinks so, too.

Like many in the new generation of tech engineers, he said he wanted to make a product "that wasn't cool, but that can help people. I saw lots of older couples who have separated beds because of snoring, and lots of other problems in their relationships."

He said there were many products on the market to tackle snoring, but that "some of them are for certain kinds of snorers - light, heavy, from the nose, from the mouth - while some solutions, which are good, like mouthpieces, are intrusive.

"We found a convenient solution that can help solve snoring when the person doesn't suffer from health issues."