Absolutely nuts that this thing wouldn't be engineered so that at least a swelling battery causes the exterior to split so that the swelling is directed out rather than in.
None of these 3 problems have anything to do with it being a smart ring. Same problems that regular rings have, yet people still wear them.
1. Adulting: buying rings that are the right size. eg My tungsten wedding ring cannot be resized either.
2. Most people don't even lift. Those that do, dont mind taking off jewelry. I can see how this would be a problem for someone who wants to wear a smart ring for lifting. Sounds like an issue that should have been noticed earlier.
3. Adulting: moving the ring up and down your soapy finger and washing your hands properly.
Most people do not wear tungsten wedding rings. A wedding band can be resized and it's typical to have it resized several times during a long marriage. This is a legitimate downside of smart rings that is only shared with one niche-but-overrepresented-here option.
My experience with devices with very small batteries is that they lose capacity (below 80%) quickly after a couple of years of daily use. By the time you need the ring resized, the battery might be worn out anyway.
It’s in reality a disposable product unfortunately, unlike a wedding band.
Odd, I was married for almost twenty years during which I think I took off my ring twice (maybe not even that much—if I recall correctly, I persuaded the surgical staff to tape my ring rather than have me remove it when I had surgery). Never had to resize it and it fit fine the whole time. I don’t know what lifestyle leads to a finger changing size dramatically during the lifespan of a smart ring.
smart rings aren't meant to last more than a couple years though - the rate of progress on these means that you're more likely going to be paying for a smart ring subscription than a physical object
Since people tend to stay married for years, and tungsten wasn't as popular previously, the actual number of adult men wearing tungsten wedding bands is probably a lot lower, maybe around 10%.
Still a lot. Approximately nobody wears them in Germany; seems like an opportunity.
Mine is serinium (a zirconium/titanium/nickel/etc. alloy), because it was cheap (because I was poor and wanted to spend more money on my then-fiancée's, of course). Serinium rings are also not resizable, and, from what I understand, they are becoming more popular (because they are cheap).
TWO! Mine's cobalt as well. My wife picked it out when I'd lost my original gold ring (temporarily, cough). Besides looking interesting, apparently it was much less expensive than gold is these days.
Rings that can't be adjusted are ubiquitous. Walk into almost any store that sells rings, most open-air stands that sell rings, and you will find some. It's true they aren't usually preferred, but they are common.
People wear wedding rings but take them off for pull up bars and so on. But a fitness tracking device you need to take off to... Do some fitness exercises... Is not a smart idea in my book.
I'd question the utility of the data from a ring for weightlifting, cardio sure but just lifting weights there's not a huge need to track your heart rate, you're not moving a lot for steps, etc.
Of course it does but it's barely relevant to the goals of the exercise though so tracking it is minimally useful beyond the vague curiosity of cataloging and measuring every moment.
I wore a Whoop for two years and recently replaced it with a Fitbit Air, and one funny thing about the tech is how it's useful during cardio and sleep, and it's useless between.
There's generally no point in wearing them all day except the fact that you'd stop wearing it if you had to go look for it every time you were going to do cardio or sleep.
I don't wear my wedding ring for similar reasons as described in this post. (Mostly reason #1.) But my wedding ring was $75, can be resized pretty cheaply if I'd like, and is harder to damage because it's just solid metal.
An Oura ring appears to be $400, easy to damage, can't be resized. Lots more room for regret there.
A tungsten wedding ring is a pretty silly/unsafe thing to have. I'll readily admit it's cool but I like my fingers too much to worry about degloving one of them. That said using it as an example of or point of comparison for most anything is pretty unrealistic.
Similarly I am not willing to wrap a LiPo battery around one of my fingers. Absolutely not. I suspect this is in part why we have not seen more smartwatch bands doing the same.
Why would a tungsten band increase the chances of degloving your finger?
A tungsten band is a lot harder than a gold band. But a gold band is already way harder than your flesh. Jimmy Fallon was wearing a traditional platinum band when he nearly lost his finger.
If you want to reduce your risk, you should either not wear a ring or wear a silicone band.
In a hospital setting nobody will be degloving your finger - this is a common situation, and they have pliers that will crack/shatter the tungsten for removal.
Steel toed work boots are almost never allowed to have a steel toe anymore. It is always plastic which is just as strong but it shatters when it breaks so they don't have to uncrush that once they get whatever fell on your toes off.
There are some rare exceptions for specific jobs, see OSHA (or your country equivalent) for the exact rules that apply to you.
There aren't many places where a wearable doesn't get in the way, even an Apple watch it's unusable if you do kettlebell training (I severely scratched one doing a kb snatch).
I also stopped wearing my wedding ring because of lifting, it mangled beyond all recognition and had to cut it off with pliers and send it for repair.
Agree. I thought this article was going to be about smart rings, but it was a rant about rings. His first exposure to rings was a smart ring, but that's it.
> Most people don't even lift. Those that do, dont mind taking off jewelry.
I dimly recall some folks promoting silicone wedding bands, although at that point I think it's more about social-signalling "I'm in a relationship" rather than a durable memento or signalling wealth.
That is what I wear - when I bother wearing one at all. Or sometimes the cheaper rubber rings, depending on what is in stock at the store. They are cheap enough that I don't worry about losing them. When (not if!) they break I just get a new one. My gold ring stays hidden at home where I don't have to worry about it.
I've never got used to the feel of a ring on my fingers though and now I do without. I know I'm married and girls never "hit on me", so I really don't need it for anything.
A health and fitness tracker that cannot be worn during a common health and fitness activity seems highly problematic as a form factor, especially since competing form factors do not have this problem.
I can't bring myself to send a corporation a constant stream of extremely personal data when I know they absolutely will sell/leak all of it along with the countless assumptions they'll make about me using that same data.
It'd be nice to have the information a ring or watch gathers as long as it stayed local. I haven't seen many products offering that though. The thought of not being able to continuously profit from surveillance is just too painful for many companies to bother creating a product aimed at the consumer who doesn't want to be spied on I guess.
Kind of. You still need an account/iphone to set it up. It will still send data via wifi if it can, and you'll be tracked over bluetooth even if you keep in in "airplane mode". I'm not sure how easily you get data off of it and onto a PC or laptop either or what format that data is in, but if you already have an iphone it's not a terrible option.
Colmi smart rings have a reverse-engineered Bluetooth protocol, so you can use Gadgetbridge instead of the official QRing app and keep everything local.
It’s why I have enjoyed my refurbished pebble though I won’t be getting their “index” because I just don’t want a smart ring tbh. Nice to have a slightly dumber product with better battery life and open source top to bottom.
I ditched my Oura ring, I found that it really was great at tracking sleep HRV and RHR, but the battery doesn't last and it's just expensive e-waste after a year and a half
I got really upset with Oura when they tried to have their cake and eat it with regards to charging a huge premium for what is a very cheap device and then also a monthly subscription for something that does not need any subscription. I bit the bullet and switched to a Garmin watch for longer battery life and no subscription.
I now have a device that has way more features and lasts significantly longer.
You're just never going to get a smart ring with a battery that lasts longer than a year or two until different/better battery technology becomes commonplace.
I've had a RingConn ring since December 2024, and I went with them primarily because they don't charge a monthly fee like Oura. But at this point the battery that originally lasted 2 weeks lasts only about 2 days. It's about the best you can expect from a ~30mAh lithium cell. Once it finally dies completely I won't be replacing it.
You can, however, design rings that can have their comparatively cheap batteries replaced, and be transparent about the expected life span of your $500+ ring that requires a subscription and whose warranty specifically excludes the battery (https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025439534-...).
I gave up on my Oura ring 6 months into use. The event that really convinced me their crap: I sat down at my desk at work, told Oura I'm starting a bike ride. One hour later it said my average HR was over 100. I have bradycardia so my heart rate never got over 60 for that hour.
BS AI hallucinations.
I don't think consumers would accept this but for athletes there has been some research that the EARLOBE might be the ultimate single point for measurement
They can even measure blood pressure in lab tests during MOVEMENT at the earlobe
Heartrate, spO2, temperature and it's even a good location for very low level of sound to be heard
Again consumers would never adopt an earlobe cuff, well maybe it was artistic somehow and not heavy/distracting
But athletes would use whatever works
If I had millions I'd invest in development, so steal this idea?
I can understand those pain points, but they don't really bother me. I'm on my 3rd oura ring now and I still like using it. I don't go crazy with the information, but I really do try to get a good night sleep and oura lets me know when I do not. I got married a few years ago and I usually don't like wearing my wedding band around because I worry about loosing it. So I wear the oura ring in place of the wedding band. I take the ring off when I lift weights and do some other things.
I also wear a garmin watch that I mostly use for tracking mountain bike rides, hikes, etc. So I'm just a geek who enjoys gadgets and the data they provide. I like that both have very long battery lives. I would love all the features of an apple watch, but I don't want to be charging it every day.
Does your body not do the same? I really want to like sleep tracking as a feature, but I find that my body already has built in sleep tracking, and the tech version doesn't give me any actionable advice on how to improve my sleep that my biological sleep tracker isn't already giving me.
I have an Oura ring but never really check the app since I’m not sure I believe a lot of the conclusions it gives me. I mainly just want a bunch of time series of signals measured from my body so after a year or two I can throw all that data (plus my own recorded notes like my weight and what I eat) into some some multivariate forecasting system to tease out predictive relationships. I don’t actually care what the signals themselves “are”.
The main problem is that a lot of the time series presented to the users of wearable products are lossy transforms of the original signals I want, so I have to use all the random projects on GitHub to try to access the raw data directly.
Assuming I made this stuff. It is useless to have smart rings do the primary stuff of what a smart watch does, so not monitor your pulse or that crap because anyone who has a smart ring should have a smart watch for that and the few people who don't want smart watches but do want smart rings would be such a small outlier group I wouldn't care.
The only way the concept of a smart ring makes sense to me is as a form of gestural navigation/usage for real world or virtual world inputs that would be similar in affect to media presentations of superpowers/magic.
Thus, with my smart ring I can walk towards my office and make the open gesture before getting to it and the door opens for me and I don't have to do the other stuff. I can make the open gesture but contact security also and it opens but contacts security.
I can make the close all the doors and lock the house gesture and only the smart ring open can open them etc.
Login open computer, I am using smart ring of course it does it.
Refuse to login open computer not using smart ring (obviously this has down sides, everything does)
Using smart ring but not you, give fake access computer in sandbox, contact security.
Obviously gestures would have to be customizable via your other smart world devices and computers and so forth. The benefits of an integrated platform.
Before anyone laughs at continual contact security. Smart ring is luxury and anyone who pays for that crap has enough money to pay for either personal security or at least an on call company, provided by smart ring services.
on edit: note this is my idea of what smart rings should do, don't know what the normal ones do, so my idea that it should be a luxury item may not track actual situation.
OK as always there are more ways for markets to split than analysis tells at the beginning. Interestingly enough this is probably also a good part of the luxury market.
I have always hated watches until I had a reasonably good one for a year, and lost it because ADHD just does not handle keeping track of things well.
But it seems to me people who refuse smart watches for normal watches probably are not doing so for crappy watches (and if you are for the rest of the post I shall assume you are the outlier). They must be reasonably luxurious brands that are preferred, as such there is a larger amount of the luxury market who might like smart rings (but this also seems off to me, who the hell wants to wear a crappy looking ring, in the luxury market.)
Maybe however the multiple watches look might catch on, like the stand-up routine of Harry Anderson the guy who used to play the judge on Night Court. He was a guy who could wear two or three watches on each hand, and maybe a couple on his ankles. That was style right there.
A knock off smart ring is $50 on Amazon with no subscription. Personal security starts at $200k a year. You may want to investigate how much what you think of as luxury costs.
I wrote my post an hour ago, immediately edited it 1 minute after to put the following in "on edit: note this is my idea of what smart rings should do, don't know what the normal ones do, so my idea that it should be a luxury item may not track actual situation"
I loved my Oura Ring 3, but one day it just stopped working, and it was past the warranty period so that I couldn't get a replacement. I thought it was stiff to pay _another_ $300 for a new ring.
At first, I thought I could try to fix it myself. But I found that the repairability scores for the Oura Ring are atrocious.
Even looking at Pebble's new voice ring, it's designed to be thrown away when the battery runs out. I like the idea of smart rings, but they seem wasteful and products not really built to last.
I also really quite like the Fitbit Air. I used to wear a Galaxy Watch but there's something really freeing about how light and unobtrusive this little wristband is.
Is there any way that smart rings outperform smart watches in terms of data collected? I've generally assumed there isn't any biometric data you can get from a finger that you can't get from a wrist.
I like my Oura ring and find it one of the least fussy fitness trackers I've used. To me, the battery question is more about time between charging. I can travel for a week on a business trip without taking the charger, no problem. The sizing issue is real and as I dropped weight, the ring became loose and would fall off. I've added a small eva tab on the inside to increase friction and reduce risk until I buy the next version sized down.
The most important metric to me was the sleep score and related components. I've noticed my performance (mentally and physically) is tied to sleep in a huge way. I was skeptical that it would capture sleep metrics accurately, but after about a year of use, I can say without question that the number it presents as my sleep score is a very good proxy of how good I feel throughout the day.
My goal for this past year has been to focus on improving sleep health and for that, the ring has been a very useful tool.
> The most important metric to me was the sleep score and related components. I've noticed my performance (mentally and physically) is tied to sleep in a huge way. I was skeptical that it would capture sleep metrics accurately, but after about a year of use, I can say without question that the number it presents as my sleep score is a very good proxy of how good I feel throughout the day.
For so many things, the absolute number being correct doesn’t matter, what’s more important is having _a_ scale that iou can use to chart against whatever you want. A “sleep score” doesn’t need to be accurate as long as it’s measuring the same thing (and that thing is the correct thing). Calorie counting is the same - it doesn’t matter if I think my breakfast is 500 calories but it’s actually 600 - as long as I consistently enter it incorrectly and measure my weight, I know I need to reduce my portion size somewhere.
Agreed. It has been consistent enough that I can make a pretty accurate guess each morning based on how I feel. With a consistent scale, I can work on the components (timing, duration, and other factors like alcohol, etc.) and I've made big improvements over the year.
I feel the same way about my Garmin watch's sleep tracking, but one thing I haven't been able to do is use that data effectively. It's an accurate after the fact representation of my sleep, but it doesn't tell me anything that my own body isn't telling me in terms of how I should adjust my sleep patterns/habits.
Do you find you change your behavior at all based on the sleep tracking?
I have sleep apnea. I have noted discussions online where people have used oura data to tune their cpap. I was wondering if anyone had used a smart watch for the same. I read that Garmin had worse sleep tracking, but more opinions would be handy
The biggest reason should be that they're just bad. They gather sus data from their undersized sensors, then derive tons of sus insights to overwhelm you. None of it is accurate enough to base major life decisions on, which is also laughable because even if it were accurate, there are effectively no major life decisions to make based on the data! Here I can save you $500: Go to bed before midnight. Set your alarm at least +8 hours from when you lay down. Sleep in a cool, dark room. Eat nothing 4 hours before bed. Don't exercise 4 hours before bed. Limit alcohol. Engage in at least 30 minutes of strenuous physical activity each day. Done.
All of these problems are solved by buying a CA$35 Colmi ring off Aliexpress.
1. If your finger changes size, spend another $35 for a second one.
2. If it gets scratched to shit, buy another one. Though I lift with my plastic R09 and there's only a bit of scratching around the edge. Other models are metal and should resist scratching better.
3. If it eventually breaks, get another one. Personally I fidget with mine a lot, so removing it before or after washing my hands happens unconsciously.
On top of that, the protocol has been reverse engineered so you can use Gadgetbridge or make your own app instead of using the stock one.
No idea how it compares, but my local Lidl was selling a smart ring for $15 so I decided to give it a shot. I assume half the measurements are "for entertainment purposes only" (glucose, blood pressure, stress [heart rate variability proxy?], blood oxygenation [might be ok with my skin tone, not sure I'd trust it]) but the others seem fairly accurate. Again, no idea how it compares to the pricier ones, but seems to match my pulse measured at neck and what I remember of my nightly sleep pretty well.
And yeah, I'm certainly not going to worry about it getting scratched or slightly wet. Actually, it got dropped and stepped on, and is slightly dented but still seems to run fine - the epoxy sealant for the electronics seems intact and while I was a bit concerned for the battery, that's been a while with no issues.
And, while I have no idea whether the app is quietly collecting data and pushing it to a server in china (if it is, it is doing it in a way that is sneaking past the firewall), at least it does not require creating an account to use.
So in that sense it is maybe more private than oura or samsung ?
I was an early adopter of Oura, and have recently stopped wearing it. I've reverted to the Apple Watch & EightSleep for all of the tracking I could ever need. I found the experience with Oura to be overly optimistic numbers wise, as well as borderline dark patterns in the app to drive my anxiety around getting good scores.
My form factor is more like a micro joycon but sits on your wrist like a fitness band & if you flick it hard enough the magnetic thingy will just come into your palm, do whatever like scroll, delete/archive emails, close tabs etc & then flick it back onto your wrist for it to attach magnetically
Yawn. Produce data to assess its value. I already check my blood pressure and heart rate daily, and when running. Heck, my watch (which I wear only at the gym) gives me feedback -- at the moment but not something I need to record.
Why why why? Those exceptions are luxuries without obvious advantages.
And, good lord, a SUBSCRIPTION to access its features. technically unnecessessary but yet another leech on my accessibility to data. (So many sites lately are behind paywalls. But you're receiving this data from my ring, WHY would I pay monthly for you to observe it and report?)
What I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention yet. If the internal batteries swell you are now in a very bad situation.
https://cybernews.com/gadgets/samsung-galaxy-smart-ring-batt...
Absolutely nuts that this thing wouldn't be engineered so that at least a swelling battery causes the exterior to split so that the swelling is directed out rather than in.
None of these 3 problems have anything to do with it being a smart ring. Same problems that regular rings have, yet people still wear them.
1. Adulting: buying rings that are the right size. eg My tungsten wedding ring cannot be resized either.
2. Most people don't even lift. Those that do, dont mind taking off jewelry. I can see how this would be a problem for someone who wants to wear a smart ring for lifting. Sounds like an issue that should have been noticed earlier.
3. Adulting: moving the ring up and down your soapy finger and washing your hands properly.
Most people do not wear tungsten wedding rings. A wedding band can be resized and it's typical to have it resized several times during a long marriage. This is a legitimate downside of smart rings that is only shared with one niche-but-overrepresented-here option.
My experience with devices with very small batteries is that they lose capacity (below 80%) quickly after a couple of years of daily use. By the time you need the ring resized, the battery might be worn out anyway.
It’s in reality a disposable product unfortunately, unlike a wedding band.
Odd, I was married for almost twenty years during which I think I took off my ring twice (maybe not even that much—if I recall correctly, I persuaded the surgical staff to tape my ring rather than have me remove it when I had surgery). Never had to resize it and it fit fine the whole time. I don’t know what lifestyle leads to a finger changing size dramatically during the lifespan of a smart ring.
The advantage of my tungsten wedding ring is I have 5 of them, some in different sizes, and it cost me less than $100 for them.
Don't look up how they get removed from your finger at the ER
smart rings aren't meant to last more than a couple years though - the rate of progress on these means that you're more likely going to be paying for a smart ring subscription than a physical object
Since this is HN: About 25% of US males wear a tungsten wedding band. So, not most, but a sizable amount.
The numbers you are probably referring to are for the market share in any given year.
https://www.jckonline.com/magazine-article/the-knot-2019-jew...
Since people tend to stay married for years, and tungsten wasn't as popular previously, the actual number of adult men wearing tungsten wedding bands is probably a lot lower, maybe around 10%.
Still a lot. Approximately nobody wears them in Germany; seems like an opportunity.
Mine is serinium (a zirconium/titanium/nickel/etc. alloy), because it was cheap (because I was poor and wanted to spend more money on my then-fiancée's, of course). Serinium rings are also not resizable, and, from what I understand, they are becoming more popular (because they are cheap).
Cobalt Chrome ring wearer here (and my wife). Not so niche I guess
True, a sample size of 1 means it is extremely common
TWO! Mine's cobalt as well. My wife picked it out when I'd lost my original gold ring (temporarily, cough). Besides looking interesting, apparently it was much less expensive than gold is these days.
Rings that can't be adjusted are ubiquitous. Walk into almost any store that sells rings, most open-air stands that sell rings, and you will find some. It's true they aren't usually preferred, but they are common.
People wear wedding rings but take them off for pull up bars and so on. But a fitness tracking device you need to take off to... Do some fitness exercises... Is not a smart idea in my book.
I'd question the utility of the data from a ring for weightlifting, cardio sure but just lifting weights there's not a huge need to track your heart rate, you're not moving a lot for steps, etc.
Lifting weights definitely causes your heart rate to change.
It's usually not the primary benefit of the exercise. You are not going to maintain zone 2 (120-140 bpm) while lifting.
Of course it does but it's barely relevant to the goals of the exercise though so tracking it is minimally useful beyond the vague curiosity of cataloging and measuring every moment.
I wore a Whoop for two years and recently replaced it with a Fitbit Air, and one funny thing about the tech is how it's useful during cardio and sleep, and it's useless between.
There's generally no point in wearing them all day except the fact that you'd stop wearing it if you had to go look for it every time you were going to do cardio or sleep.
I don't wear my wedding ring for similar reasons as described in this post. (Mostly reason #1.) But my wedding ring was $75, can be resized pretty cheaply if I'd like, and is harder to damage because it's just solid metal.
An Oura ring appears to be $400, easy to damage, can't be resized. Lots more room for regret there.
A tungsten wedding ring is a pretty silly/unsafe thing to have. I'll readily admit it's cool but I like my fingers too much to worry about degloving one of them. That said using it as an example of or point of comparison for most anything is pretty unrealistic.
Similarly I am not willing to wrap a LiPo battery around one of my fingers. Absolutely not. I suspect this is in part why we have not seen more smartwatch bands doing the same.
Why would a tungsten band increase the chances of degloving your finger?
A tungsten band is a lot harder than a gold band. But a gold band is already way harder than your flesh. Jimmy Fallon was wearing a traditional platinum band when he nearly lost his finger.
If you want to reduce your risk, you should either not wear a ring or wear a silicone band.
In a hospital, they may need to remove the ring quickly for example, if your finger was injured and begins to swell.
In a hospital setting nobody will be degloving your finger - this is a common situation, and they have pliers that will crack/shatter the tungsten for removal.
I'm guessing that strongly depends on how big the hospital is. I know someone who lives out in the boonies and it's amazing what isn't on hand.
Steel toed work boots are almost never allowed to have a steel toe anymore. It is always plastic which is just as strong but it shatters when it breaks so they don't have to uncrush that once they get whatever fell on your toes off.
There are some rare exceptions for specific jobs, see OSHA (or your country equivalent) for the exact rules that apply to you.
There aren't many places where a wearable doesn't get in the way, even an Apple watch it's unusable if you do kettlebell training (I severely scratched one doing a kb snatch).
I also stopped wearing my wedding ring because of lifting, it mangled beyond all recognition and had to cut it off with pliers and send it for repair.
I have a soft gold ring, and I lift. I take my ring off to lift or it would get absolutely destroyed.
Agree. I thought this article was going to be about smart rings, but it was a rant about rings. His first exposure to rings was a smart ring, but that's it.
> Most people don't even lift. Those that do, dont mind taking off jewelry.
I dimly recall some folks promoting silicone wedding bands, although at that point I think it's more about social-signalling "I'm in a relationship" rather than a durable memento or signalling wealth.
That is what I wear - when I bother wearing one at all. Or sometimes the cheaper rubber rings, depending on what is in stock at the store. They are cheap enough that I don't worry about losing them. When (not if!) they break I just get a new one. My gold ring stays hidden at home where I don't have to worry about it.
I've never got used to the feel of a ring on my fingers though and now I do without. I know I'm married and girls never "hit on me", so I really don't need it for anything.
> Adulting: buying rings that are the right size.
He did buy it at the right size. Then he lost weight.
A health and fitness tracker that cannot be worn during a common health and fitness activity seems highly problematic as a form factor, especially since competing form factors do not have this problem.
I can't bring myself to send a corporation a constant stream of extremely personal data when I know they absolutely will sell/leak all of it along with the countless assumptions they'll make about me using that same data.
It'd be nice to have the information a ring or watch gathers as long as it stayed local. I haven't seen many products offering that though. The thought of not being able to continuously profit from surveillance is just too painful for many companies to bother creating a product aimed at the consumer who doesn't want to be spied on I guess.
Exactly why I abandoned my Oura ring. I stopped wearing it for a couple of years, and when I went back, it wouldn't work without a cloud account/sync.
For what it’s worth the Apple Watch can store data entirely locally, or if you want sync it’s E2EE.
Kind of. You still need an account/iphone to set it up. It will still send data via wifi if it can, and you'll be tracked over bluetooth even if you keep in in "airplane mode". I'm not sure how easily you get data off of it and onto a PC or laptop either or what format that data is in, but if you already have an iphone it's not a terrible option.
You can export all data in xml
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-your-health-dat...
Colmi smart rings have a reverse-engineered Bluetooth protocol, so you can use Gadgetbridge instead of the official QRing app and keep everything local.
Pebble Index!
It’s why I have enjoyed my refurbished pebble though I won’t be getting their “index” because I just don’t want a smart ring tbh. Nice to have a slightly dumber product with better battery life and open source top to bottom.
I ditched my Oura ring, I found that it really was great at tracking sleep HRV and RHR, but the battery doesn't last and it's just expensive e-waste after a year and a half
I got really upset with Oura when they tried to have their cake and eat it with regards to charging a huge premium for what is a very cheap device and then also a monthly subscription for something that does not need any subscription. I bit the bullet and switched to a Garmin watch for longer battery life and no subscription.
I now have a device that has way more features and lasts significantly longer.
You're just never going to get a smart ring with a battery that lasts longer than a year or two until different/better battery technology becomes commonplace.
I've had a RingConn ring since December 2024, and I went with them primarily because they don't charge a monthly fee like Oura. But at this point the battery that originally lasted 2 weeks lasts only about 2 days. It's about the best you can expect from a ~30mAh lithium cell. Once it finally dies completely I won't be replacing it.
You can, however, design rings that can have their comparatively cheap batteries replaced, and be transparent about the expected life span of your $500+ ring that requires a subscription and whose warranty specifically excludes the battery (https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025439534-...).
What's the new device?
I gave up on my Oura ring 6 months into use. The event that really convinced me their crap: I sat down at my desk at work, told Oura I'm starting a bike ride. One hour later it said my average HR was over 100. I have bradycardia so my heart rate never got over 60 for that hour. BS AI hallucinations.
I doubt AI hallucinations had anything to do with it
I don't think consumers would accept this but for athletes there has been some research that the EARLOBE might be the ultimate single point for measurement
They can even measure blood pressure in lab tests during MOVEMENT at the earlobe
Heartrate, spO2, temperature and it's even a good location for very low level of sound to be heard
Again consumers would never adopt an earlobe cuff, well maybe it was artistic somehow and not heavy/distracting
But athletes would use whatever works
If I had millions I'd invest in development, so steal this idea?
I can understand those pain points, but they don't really bother me. I'm on my 3rd oura ring now and I still like using it. I don't go crazy with the information, but I really do try to get a good night sleep and oura lets me know when I do not. I got married a few years ago and I usually don't like wearing my wedding band around because I worry about loosing it. So I wear the oura ring in place of the wedding band. I take the ring off when I lift weights and do some other things.
I also wear a garmin watch that I mostly use for tracking mountain bike rides, hikes, etc. So I'm just a geek who enjoys gadgets and the data they provide. I like that both have very long battery lives. I would love all the features of an apple watch, but I don't want to be charging it every day.
>... oura lets me know when I do not.
Does your body not do the same? I really want to like sleep tracking as a feature, but I find that my body already has built in sleep tracking, and the tech version doesn't give me any actionable advice on how to improve my sleep that my biological sleep tracker isn't already giving me.
I have an Oura ring but never really check the app since I’m not sure I believe a lot of the conclusions it gives me. I mainly just want a bunch of time series of signals measured from my body so after a year or two I can throw all that data (plus my own recorded notes like my weight and what I eat) into some some multivariate forecasting system to tease out predictive relationships. I don’t actually care what the signals themselves “are”.
The main problem is that a lot of the time series presented to the users of wearable products are lossy transforms of the original signals I want, so I have to use all the random projects on GitHub to try to access the raw data directly.
Assuming I made this stuff. It is useless to have smart rings do the primary stuff of what a smart watch does, so not monitor your pulse or that crap because anyone who has a smart ring should have a smart watch for that and the few people who don't want smart watches but do want smart rings would be such a small outlier group I wouldn't care.
The only way the concept of a smart ring makes sense to me is as a form of gestural navigation/usage for real world or virtual world inputs that would be similar in affect to media presentations of superpowers/magic.
Thus, with my smart ring I can walk towards my office and make the open gesture before getting to it and the door opens for me and I don't have to do the other stuff. I can make the open gesture but contact security also and it opens but contacts security.
I can make the close all the doors and lock the house gesture and only the smart ring open can open them etc.
Login open computer, I am using smart ring of course it does it.
Refuse to login open computer not using smart ring (obviously this has down sides, everything does)
Using smart ring but not you, give fake access computer in sandbox, contact security.
Obviously gestures would have to be customizable via your other smart world devices and computers and so forth. The benefits of an integrated platform.
Before anyone laughs at continual contact security. Smart ring is luxury and anyone who pays for that crap has enough money to pay for either personal security or at least an on call company, provided by smart ring services.
on edit: note this is my idea of what smart rings should do, don't know what the normal ones do, so my idea that it should be a luxury item may not track actual situation.
> It is useless to have smart rings do the primary stuff of what a smart watch does
Not for me. I like wearing a normal watch, and I don't want to wear two watches.
OK as always there are more ways for markets to split than analysis tells at the beginning. Interestingly enough this is probably also a good part of the luxury market.
I have always hated watches until I had a reasonably good one for a year, and lost it because ADHD just does not handle keeping track of things well.
But it seems to me people who refuse smart watches for normal watches probably are not doing so for crappy watches (and if you are for the rest of the post I shall assume you are the outlier). They must be reasonably luxurious brands that are preferred, as such there is a larger amount of the luxury market who might like smart rings (but this also seems off to me, who the hell wants to wear a crappy looking ring, in the luxury market.)
Maybe however the multiple watches look might catch on, like the stand-up routine of Harry Anderson the guy who used to play the judge on Night Court. He was a guy who could wear two or three watches on each hand, and maybe a couple on his ankles. That was style right there.
Same, I got a Withings watch, which is both
A knock off smart ring is $50 on Amazon with no subscription. Personal security starts at $200k a year. You may want to investigate how much what you think of as luxury costs.
I wrote my post an hour ago, immediately edited it 1 minute after to put the following in "on edit: note this is my idea of what smart rings should do, don't know what the normal ones do, so my idea that it should be a luxury item may not track actual situation"
you posted yours 44 minutes ago.
I loved my Oura Ring 3, but one day it just stopped working, and it was past the warranty period so that I couldn't get a replacement. I thought it was stiff to pay _another_ $300 for a new ring.
At first, I thought I could try to fix it myself. But I found that the repairability scores for the Oura Ring are atrocious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqCp-z9WAkA
Even looking at Pebble's new voice ring, it's designed to be thrown away when the battery runs out. I like the idea of smart rings, but they seem wasteful and products not really built to last.
I also really quite like the Fitbit Air. I used to wear a Galaxy Watch but there's something really freeing about how light and unobtrusive this little wristband is.
I recently (June) bought an Air too to replace my 5 or 6 year old Apple Watch.
I'm enjoying it for the same reasons. Longer battery life. More comfortable when I'm sleeping since it has no buttons or weird bulky shape.
I do wish Apple would make their own version of it with apple pay.
Is there any way that smart rings outperform smart watches in terms of data collected? I've generally assumed there isn't any biometric data you can get from a finger that you can't get from a wrist.
As far as I know the smart rings are much more accurate than watches but that could just be marketing bollocks from Oura
My Oura Ring picked up on breathing fluctuations that my Garmin did not detect.
However my Oura Ring was also very battery-constrained so it also only looked at heart rate every few minutes. My Garmin measured it every second.
I like my Oura ring and find it one of the least fussy fitness trackers I've used. To me, the battery question is more about time between charging. I can travel for a week on a business trip without taking the charger, no problem. The sizing issue is real and as I dropped weight, the ring became loose and would fall off. I've added a small eva tab on the inside to increase friction and reduce risk until I buy the next version sized down.
The most important metric to me was the sleep score and related components. I've noticed my performance (mentally and physically) is tied to sleep in a huge way. I was skeptical that it would capture sleep metrics accurately, but after about a year of use, I can say without question that the number it presents as my sleep score is a very good proxy of how good I feel throughout the day.
My goal for this past year has been to focus on improving sleep health and for that, the ring has been a very useful tool.
> The most important metric to me was the sleep score and related components. I've noticed my performance (mentally and physically) is tied to sleep in a huge way. I was skeptical that it would capture sleep metrics accurately, but after about a year of use, I can say without question that the number it presents as my sleep score is a very good proxy of how good I feel throughout the day.
For so many things, the absolute number being correct doesn’t matter, what’s more important is having _a_ scale that iou can use to chart against whatever you want. A “sleep score” doesn’t need to be accurate as long as it’s measuring the same thing (and that thing is the correct thing). Calorie counting is the same - it doesn’t matter if I think my breakfast is 500 calories but it’s actually 600 - as long as I consistently enter it incorrectly and measure my weight, I know I need to reduce my portion size somewhere.
Agreed. It has been consistent enough that I can make a pretty accurate guess each morning based on how I feel. With a consistent scale, I can work on the components (timing, duration, and other factors like alcohol, etc.) and I've made big improvements over the year.
I feel the same way about my Garmin watch's sleep tracking, but one thing I haven't been able to do is use that data effectively. It's an accurate after the fact representation of my sleep, but it doesn't tell me anything that my own body isn't telling me in terms of how I should adjust my sleep patterns/habits.
Do you find you change your behavior at all based on the sleep tracking?
I have sleep apnea. I have noted discussions online where people have used oura data to tune their cpap. I was wondering if anyone had used a smart watch for the same. I read that Garmin had worse sleep tracking, but more opinions would be handy
The biggest reason should be that they're just bad. They gather sus data from their undersized sensors, then derive tons of sus insights to overwhelm you. None of it is accurate enough to base major life decisions on, which is also laughable because even if it were accurate, there are effectively no major life decisions to make based on the data! Here I can save you $500: Go to bed before midnight. Set your alarm at least +8 hours from when you lay down. Sleep in a cool, dark room. Eat nothing 4 hours before bed. Don't exercise 4 hours before bed. Limit alcohol. Engage in at least 30 minutes of strenuous physical activity each day. Done.
Hey now, you're going to kill the whole fitness tracker industry if you let people in on those secrets.
A lot of people seem to buy fitness trackers merely to verify they sleep poorly, and then do nothing about it.
Most people would be better off doing one sleep study. Depth over breadth
All of these problems are solved by buying a CA$35 Colmi ring off Aliexpress.
1. If your finger changes size, spend another $35 for a second one.
2. If it gets scratched to shit, buy another one. Though I lift with my plastic R09 and there's only a bit of scratching around the edge. Other models are metal and should resist scratching better.
3. If it eventually breaks, get another one. Personally I fidget with mine a lot, so removing it before or after washing my hands happens unconsciously.
On top of that, the protocol has been reverse engineered so you can use Gadgetbridge or make your own app instead of using the stock one.
No idea how it compares, but my local Lidl was selling a smart ring for $15 so I decided to give it a shot. I assume half the measurements are "for entertainment purposes only" (glucose, blood pressure, stress [heart rate variability proxy?], blood oxygenation [might be ok with my skin tone, not sure I'd trust it]) but the others seem fairly accurate. Again, no idea how it compares to the pricier ones, but seems to match my pulse measured at neck and what I remember of my nightly sleep pretty well.
And yeah, I'm certainly not going to worry about it getting scratched or slightly wet. Actually, it got dropped and stepped on, and is slightly dented but still seems to run fine - the epoxy sealant for the electronics seems intact and while I was a bit concerned for the battery, that's been a while with no issues.
And, while I have no idea whether the app is quietly collecting data and pushing it to a server in china (if it is, it is doing it in a way that is sneaking past the firewall), at least it does not require creating an account to use.
So in that sense it is maybe more private than oura or samsung ?
I was an early adopter of Oura, and have recently stopped wearing it. I've reverted to the Apple Watch & EightSleep for all of the tracking I could ever need. I found the experience with Oura to be overly optimistic numbers wise, as well as borderline dark patterns in the app to drive my anxiety around getting good scores.
One word on rings: degloving
If you're in an industry where that's a real risk, then sure, but rings are ancient.
Aye allow rings - silicone is all I can tolerate; like to use my hands!
I just want an HID emulator I can flick into my palm and send keyboard/mouse/trackpad events to whatever Bluetooth device I want.
Same. The Even Realities R1 ring looks interesting, but only works with their glasses.
My form factor is more like a micro joycon but sits on your wrist like a fitness band & if you flick it hard enough the magnetic thingy will just come into your palm, do whatever like scroll, delete/archive emails, close tabs etc & then flick it back onto your wrist for it to attach magnetically
I have all these same complaints about regular rings.
Oura Ring 5 has solved all my issues with prior versions
Yawn. Produce data to assess its value. I already check my blood pressure and heart rate daily, and when running. Heck, my watch (which I wear only at the gym) gives me feedback -- at the moment but not something I need to record. Why why why? Those exceptions are luxuries without obvious advantages.
And, good lord, a SUBSCRIPTION to access its features. technically unnecessessary but yet another leech on my accessibility to data. (So many sites lately are behind paywalls. But you're receiving this data from my ring, WHY would I pay monthly for you to observe it and report?)