Do you need a Smart RING? Ultrahuman RING AIR Review

This little thing you might have seen show up in the last couple week’s worth of videos isn’t a striking fashion accessory – well it is, but I’m not wearing it by choice – it’s actually a smart ring, and I think in this video I need to answer two questions: first, do you even need a smart ring; and second, is this Ultrahuman RING AIR any good? Let’s start with the basics first, like what makes this ring “smart”? Despite the raw titanium outer ring, if you look inside you’ll notice there are, in fact, electronics in there. In fact it’s kind of an entire fitbit, but built into a ring! This little sensor you can see in the middle is the heart rate and blood oxygen sensor, there’s also a skin temperature sensor, and there’s an accelerometer for step and activity tracking. To be clear though, this isn’t like a smart watch where you get notifications or even a way to interact with it beyond syncing data over Bluetooth. This is an activity and sleep tracker. 

While you’ve likely got a hundred questions you want answers to, I imagine the most pressing would be battery life and charging – and I don’t blame you. The idea that this ring can do activity and sleep tracking is already kind of insane, so it must need charging every ten minutes, right? Well amazingly, through a mixture of not doing continuous monitoring and some black magic, the 24 mAh battery in here – yes 24 mAh, 50 times smaller than a AAA battery – lasts for up to SIX DAYS, and takes 2-3 hours to charge on their USB C inductive charger. The ring can store up to 6 days of data too, so you don’t have to carefully monitor it all that often if you don’t want to. That is frankly incredible – and through the magic of having worn this for a little over two weeks now I can confirm that battery life is legit. I’ve only charged it twice in those two weeks (not including the initial setup charging). 

So, if the battery is more than adequate, the charging is pretty fast (I mean you’d imagine a 24mAh cell could be charged almost instantly but there’s definitely something funky going on with the charging here), we can focus on what this thing actually does. As I said you’ve got heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature and motion data, and it seems Ultrahuman can do quite a lot. We’re going to spend a lot of time looking at their app, because that’s where all the magic happens. The ring is just the data collection tool, the app is where that information gets used – and where you can see things like battery life too as there are no outward indications the ring is on or working, save for the occasional green light from the sensors taking measurements – and interestingly the app changes throughout the day. During the start and middle of the day the app focuses on your last night’s sleep, your movement and activity, and the ‘caffeine delay window’ block shows you how to optimise your caffeine intake – not that I take caffeine at all. If I’m honest, I’m not entirely sure how accurate both the sleep and step tracking actually is. The steps are somewhat believable, but likely inflated a little. The sleep tracking though, that’s really pretty far off. It says I’m awake in bursts throughout the night, when in reality I sleep like a damn log. I fall asleep at between midnight and one o’clock and wake up between eight and nine AM, and don’t wake up between. The ring disagrees – quite drastically. One thing I do agree with is that it says I basically never enter deep sleep, and I’d agree. I don’t feel rested when I wake up – although I haven’t felt like I’ve had a “good night’s sleep” for a decade so I guess I’m used to it. 

One of the key things the app wants you to do, but I’m unable to do, is add tags for why you had a bad night’s sleep, or your heart rate variability wasn’t as good as they want it to be. This is, at least in theory, a pretty necessary step in making improvements to your life. Tracking why you’re having a bad time, and giving you the data to make positive changes. The problem is that I have no idea why I don’t sleep well. I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t smoke or do recreational drugs, I’m not sick – or as the app puts it, a “high immune load” – I’m no more stressed than usual… So I can’t exactly tag anything here. In theory you can tag stuff you’re trying out, “ear plugs” are one of the built in tags which you could tag having used them as an example, although if I’m honest that’s way too much effort for my ADHD brain to handle. In fact tagging stuff in an app is too much work for me, so I’d really appreciate options to add notifications to remind me to do it. In fact I’d really like options to change the damn notifications I do get, because my god they are useless. Literally as I’m writing this I got one saying “You’re a mover! By taking action and moving, you’re making progress towards your fitness goals. Keep up the great work!”. While I appreciate some might like an app cheering them on, this is just annoying to me. Luckily there are at least a couple of controls – one for frequency (although no option to turn them all off, just ‘Minimal Mode’) and toggles for those movement alerts, circadian alignment, caffeine window and marketing alerts. I’ve disabled them all now because none of those are actually helpful for me. As you get towards the end of the day the “Circadian Alignment” window moves to the top and tells you to stop looking at screens and avoid caffeine around six hours before bed – legitimately I got a notification telling me to start winding down at six thirty PM when it knew I wasn’t going to bed until half twelve. On a Saturday! 

Interestingly, if it detects patterns it recognises, it essentially picks labels for you and then gives advice. I didn’t sleep well on Saturday night as I was excited for an event on Sunday, and the ring/app decided that was a symptom of me getting sick and tagged my sleep with “High Immune Load”, and told me to rest and take it easy. I can say that, at least a couple days later now, I’m still not sick, so that was an erroneous reading – and if I was to be blunt, I don’t think the ring can collect enough data to give such direct medical advice. It doesn’t know that I’m immunocompromised and taking six different medications that could affect things – and I don’t really want to tell it just so it can store that data on their servers (I’ll come back to that in a moment)… In theory this could be really cool, especially on a metaanalysis level, but it does also rely heavily on self-reporting information like “yes I got sick a day later”, and especially if the app just imposes those labels on you it is creating unreliable data that I assume it’s going to rely on later in a bit of a vicious cycle. 

The other bit of health info I’m really not sure about is the reason I had to wait over two weeks to make this video – the “Ultra Age”. This is, in theory anyway, a report on how fast your brain, heart and blood are ageing. Despite having 16 days worth of data as of filming, I only have access to the “Brain Age” stat, not pulse or blood, although the brain age looks to be derived from their “sleep debt” stat, combined with I’m guessing some data they’ve selected to say that if you consistently have “sleep debt” you’ll suffer later in life I guess. Again, this feels dangerously close to actual medical advice, all derived from just pulse, blood oxygen, skin temperature and motion. That feels like a stretch to me, and I’d hate to make changes to my life based on this artificial score. It feels a little scaremonger-y, like “oh watch out, you’re aging 1.9x faster than you should!” especially when the data it is basing that on is middling in accuracy. It consistently says I’m awake throughout the night, when that just isn’t the case, for example, so to then say, based on that, that my brain is shriveling before my very eyes feels… misguided. 

Of course you can also do exercise tracking, everything from gaming to marathons, and during that you will run the battery down a fair bit faster than normal. If you use it for activity tracking you will need to charge it more frequently, although the fact it can charge relatively quickly means that isn’t too big a deal. This also does factor in to the sorts of data the app can show you – stuff like your VO2 max, which really needs multiple aerobic workouts to give you an accurate reading, not the single breath exercise I did to initially get a result. Still it’s nice to have the data – although if I’m honest, I’m not sure how much use I, or really most people, have for data like this. For actual workout training stuff, sure, and again you can tag what you were doing and what pre-game stuff you took – y’know how many kilos of creatine you stuffed down your protein filled face before working out, that kinda stuff – and then sure, this data makes sense. But for just everyday? I don’t know how useful that is to me. 

I should also talk about the fit and fitting process. When you order a ring you get sent this ring fitting kit. It’s plastic versions of the exact ring shape – including the little flat spot where the main sensor sits – and comes in quite the range of sizes. I went for a size 12 – the third largest – whereas my wife would have opted for more like a seven or so. The size 12 fits both my middle and index fingers, and while I initially wore it on my middle finger, I quickly found out why they recommend it to be on your index finger. This thing is pretty huge. Like, my wedding band is already a pretty big ring, but this is just miles larger. If you do wear it on your middle finger you’ll quickly find it digging into the bone of both your ring and index fingers – it’s that wide. Even with it on my index finger I’ve noticed my middle finger has an indent on the side with the ring. I’d argue that this is intrusively larger too. It sits so proud of your finger that it’s the first thing to hit anything you’re touching with your palm. You catch it on stuff a lot, it gets in the way – like when I’m playing the drums the sticks tap on it – and while it is ironically worryingly light, it isn’t half an intrusion to wear. I should caveat this point by saying I’m autistic and have a fair few sensory issues – I don’t wear watches for that reason – so I am likely quite pessimistic in my view of this because for two weeks straight I’ve been mildly uncomfortable having this on me. Still, it is noticeably large, and I think between the width and the length, this really only suits male hands. This isn’t dainty or quaint, it’s bold and imposing. The shape also makes it uncomfortable too. The design is basically a C channel of titanium with the electronics inside, then a layer of resin to infill and secure the components. That does mean it’s fully waterproof which is nice, but it also means it has a thick, flat edge that actually caused blood blisters on my palm when wearing it on my middle finger and using even just drum sticks, or ratchets. This is not a comfortable thing to wear. 

Another concern, which is possibly a bigger deal for me because I’m autistic but who knows maybe you care too, is privacy, and the fact that the data the ring collects is synced to your phone, and then to Ultrahuman’s servers. This is clear when skipping through the data as it shows a toast notification at the bottom saying “syncing with server…”. Their privacy policy also notes they collect all the data from the ring. To me that’s quite a stretch to accept that someone else has all the data on my location, my heart rate, my sleep times and quality, my activity… Everything. Hell, even my height, weight, age and gender! That’s a lot of information for me to be freely giving to this company. The fact there aren’t many other controls beyond “share data with coaches and support” is pretty annoying. I’d much rather have it be an option to store data on their servers, rather than a requirement, and that alone I think would have me not buying one of these – regardless of anything else. 

Since we’re talking concerns, I have a couple more. First, the titanium – which is supposedly coated in a layer of tungsten carbide (what my wedding band is made from) – has managed to be scratched really pretty badly, all in just two weeks of wearing it. Considering my wedding band is scratch free and I’ve worn that through every car repair job I’ve done in the last three years, this thing being so scuffed up isn’t a great sign. Another thing is the ads for their other products – one is a home air quality monitor that’ll set you back £489, and the other is a glucose monitoring patch that costs £169 per month! While these do seem to all integrate together to give you a fuller picture of your health – and I’m sure they work wonderfully – spending nearly £1000 up front, then £169 per month assumedly forever is a hell of a lot of money, and unless you either have so much disposable income that that isn’t a decent chunk of your monthly outgoings (for context, my mortgage is £450 per month), or you are truly getting your money’s worth when it comes to improving your life thanks to this data, this isn’t for you. 

And I think that brings us nicely to our first question – do you even need a smart ring? Personally, no. I don’t. I’ll be taking this off after this video. I don’t find much use for the data this provides beyond telling me what I already know. I obviously can’t speak for the general population, but I think if you’ve ever tried a FitBit or smart watch and then not found use for the data they provide, you’ll be in the exact same camp with this thing. Beyond the size and shape, there isn’t anything majorly wrong with this thing, so if you are sure you can make use of the data it provides – and you don’t mind the size – then by all means splash out the £329 for the ring. I should note that while they say it’s “subscription free”, there are, in fact, four possible subscriptions. Five if you include the glucose monitors I guess. The first is their UltrahumanX ‘membership’ basically insurance and ‘premium support’. That’s either £36 per year or £54 for two years – or between £2.25 and £3 per month. Then there is “Cardio Adaptability” which I think just gives you more data on heart rate during sleep, and that’s £2.90 per month. There’s also “AFib Detection” which detects Atrial Fibrillation – something I’ve experienced and trust me you don’t need a ring to tell you it’s happening – that’s £4.90 per month. And lastly there is the newest subscription, “UltraSync for Tesla”, which is £6.90 per month, and basically pulls your driving data from your Tesla to give you a “Drive Readiness Score”, “proactive Climate Control suggestions” and a “detailed ride history”. It tracks for me that the sort of person who’d buy this also has a Tesla. Yep.

So, do you need a smart ring? Almost certainly not. If you do, this one does seem to do mostly what it says, and with its health focused approach I can see why you might opt for this – should you have the cash and desire to use the data anyway. Unfortunately that isn’t me, but if it is you, please do let me know in the comments down below, I’d love to hear what use you get from this sort of thing!