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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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"
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 ?
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.
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 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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
Cobalt Chrome ring wearer here (and my wife). Not so niche I guess
True, a sample size of 1 means it is extremely common
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Adulting: buying rings that are the right size.
He did buy it at the right size. Then he lost weight.
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.
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 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.
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.
For what it’s worth the Apple Watch can store data entirely locally, or if you want sync it’s E2EE.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
Aye allow rings - silicone is all I can tolerate; like to use my hands!
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 ?
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.
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
you know how they take your pulse at the doctors with your finger?
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.
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 have all these same complaints about regular rings.
One word on rings: degloving
If you're in an industry where that's a real risk, then sure, but rings are ancient.
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?)