This ring wants to help you live longer. I gave it a try

From smartwatches to connected scales and even Wi-Fi beds, it’s a well-established idea that access to information about how our bodies are running can help us meet our wellness goals, get an early warning on potential issues and encourage healthy habits. And a new gadget has emerged recently that promises 24/7 tracking in the most subtle way possible; disguised as a ring.

Smart rings from Samsung and Oura have shown what’s possible, and the new Ultrahuman Ring Air is an even lighter and less conspicuous option. At $600 (and no subscription necessary), it’s a plain and extremely light ring in black, gold, silver or grey titanium, with a comfy hypoallergenic epoxy on the inside that lets you peer in at the hardware for measuring heart rate, skin temperature, movement, blood oxygen and more. And, of course, it connects to its own app on your iPhone or Android.

Physically, it’s an undeniably masculine ring, but it does look like regular dumb jewellery at a glance. Mine has picked up a lot of scratches and marks on the coating over a few weeks of wear, so I’m not sure what it would look like in a year. It just feels like wearing a ring, and most of the time I forget it’s there.

The ring takes heart rate readings periodically, counts steps and detects workouts for finer tracking. When you sleep or nap, it calculates stages and monitors movement and timing. And all the data goes to the main platform to be crunched into insights about stress, recovery, alertness and more.

My review ring feels very solid, but it’s picked up a lot more scratches than I expected in a few weeks.Credit: Tim Biggs

Ultrahuman is a platform based in India that focuses on longevity through data tracking. In addition to the ring, it sells a biosensor for continuous glucose monitoring, so you can see the effect of food on your metabolism, and the software is big on keeping biomarkers within certain zones. While collecting data on our bodies can be good, it’s also known that becoming too attached to the numbers can be decidedly unhealthy, and it’s easy to be reminded of this when glancing at all the goals and dashboards in the Ultrahuman app.

The platform sorts all your data into insights on its main dashboard.

Whether the platform can ultimately help people live longer is a bit beyond the scope of this review. But based purely on my experience with this ring and its app, even if I could somehow be assured that following every one of the suggestions would net me a few extra days on Earth, I’m not certain it would be worth it.

By default, Ultrahuman bombards me with reminders to stick to my “caffeine permissible window”, which apparently doesn’t start until two hours after I wake up; and warnings to limit light exposure by 7pm. I get vague informational updates about sleep debt and stress rhythm, reminders to stretch my limbs and walk around, and prods about infinitesimal changes in my heart rate variability. If you dive into the data in the app, you can get lost in a sea of minima zones, phase advance goals (it’s tracking my progress towards waking my body up earlier, but I already get up at 6.30?), sympathetic activation and hormone health.

I’m sure it’s all grounded in research, but it smacks of a pseudoscience useful to people obsessed with maximising body efficiency, whereas I mainly want to keep an eye out to make sure my data for steps, sleep, exercise, weight and the like are trending towards the healthy middle of the scale rather than the risky outer edge.

The good news is that you can just set all the data to export to the platform of your choice, and turn off whatever notifications you don’t want, so the actual longevity science part is optional. And with the information flowing from the ring through to Apple Health, I found it was pretty good at passively collecting all the tracking data to be graphed over time.

Information on my sleep stages was roughly comparable to that picked up by other tracking methods I pitted it against, and steps, movement and heart rate variability came through looking accurate as well. For granular details on specific workouts, like pace and VO2 Max, a smartwatch would likely be better, but if you just need to log your daily data, the ring’s a reliable method.

The ring is rated waterproof up to 100 metres, for up to 12 hours.

Battery life is obviously a concern in a package this tiny. Ultrahuman says four to six days, but four is a realistic expectation. It takes around three hours to fully charge on the handy little puck, so you should just be able to put it on there every day as you’re getting ready, and it will stay charged.

Going back to the Ultrahuman platform, there are some interesting elements even if you’re not into charts of your supposed stress responses. There’s an entire education section that has videos and podcasts on biomarkers, blood sugar, hormones and exercise. Some of it is from the expected gaunt-looking longevity experts and biohackers, but there’s interesting stuff from athletes and scientists, too.

And if you’re looking for content that might help the readings from your ring trend in a positive direction, there are also a lot of free meditation guides, workout videos and sleep aid stories.

Ultrahuman says no paid subscription is required, which is a point of difference from its competitor Oura, and that is true; everything I’ve described so far is free on the app. But that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t try to sell you stuff.

There’s a marketplace of sorts called PowerPlugs, which includes paid and subscription offerings. PowerPlugs are tracking modules that focus on specific goals; the circadian rhythm and caffeine window tracking I mentioned above are PowerPlugs that are active by default. Free options include ovulation tracking, sun exposure and screen time. Paid options include “cardio adaptability” (nighttime cardio stress insights) at $4.26 monthly. Other PowerPlugs including jet lag, weight loss and a paid atrial fibrillation detection module, are marked as coming soon.

There’s also a store in the app selling Ultrahuman gear including sleep masks and blue light blocking glasses, plus subscriptions to nutritional supplement review platform Examine+. And of course, Ultrahuman does offer its own subscription too. At around $80 for two years, it includes priority support, insurance against accidental damage, and one free switch to a smaller ring if you happen to lose weight.

All up, it’s a convincing alternative to a smartwatch, albeit one that won’t save you any money despite its lack of a screen or any computing features. Its selling point is how discreet and essentially invisible it is, plus its integration with a data-intensive longevity and exercise platform, if that’s your thing.

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