This smart mood ring is supposed to monitor mental health — without changing colors

Image: Happy Health

Happy Health wants to make the mood ring smarter. The Happy Ring is a device that uses artificial intelligence andbiometrics to alert users about their mental health.

The Happy Ring, which just received $60 million in funding, has an EDA sensor that can be used to monitor stress levels in real time. The device can be used to detect when your sympathetic nervous system starts raring up.

According to a medical doctor and Happy Health CEO, the brain responds to difficult thoughts and strong emotions. The small amounts of sweat that start to be produced on the palm of the hand can be measured by EDA sensors. Freckleton explained that Happy Ring's EDA sensor looks for sweat glands openings or sweat production, which is fed into an algorithm to identify your emotional state. The ring constantly adjusts the model to the data of the individual person, instead of comparing that person's data to a set of users.

Happy Health founder Sean rad says that they tell you about your mood on an ongoing basis. We personalize exercises for you that are proven to help manage stress and improve your mood. From a security and standards perspective, the device is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), but didn't go into more detail about Happy Health's privacy policy and how data is stored

Image: Happy Health

Breath work, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy-based journal are included in those exercises. All of the exercises can be completed in-app and tracked by the ring as you complete them.

EDA sensors can be used as a means of tracking stress or emotion. The benefit of a ring is that it is better suited than a wrist or torso-based tracker to measure stress as it is on the hand itself. You have to put your hand over the display to get a reading.

Four skin electrodes, four light wavelength, and two temperature sensors are included in the device's sensors. It has an estimated battery life of up to 3 days.

A lot of this sounds familiar to features you will find in an Oura Ring or a Whoop. The Happy Ring tracks metrics like heart rate and heart rate variation as a proxy for how well your body has recovered from physical stress, whereas other Wearables track metrics like heart rate and heart rate variation as a proxy for how well your Body has Recovered from Physical Stress.

Image: Happy Health

"We don't have any metrics around mental health." We don't give you metrics that are about helping you perform. They talk about how to recover. We are talking about unique measures of your brain health.

The Happy Ring has built its EDA sensor from the ground up with medical-grade accuracy, so it is more accurate than what is currently available. He pointed to a study in the journal Sleep that compared the device to other Wearables. Peer-reviewed studies of any kind are rare when it comes to health and wellbeing gadgets.

The Happy Ring is a wellbeing device. It isn't meant to diagnose any mental condition. The device is not a clinical device according to the author.

Happy Health has a wait list and the device will be shipped on a first come, first serve basis. Users might not be too fond of the fact that it uses a subscription model. You don't pay for the hardware upfront, but it's built into a subscription tier. If you choose the 24 month plan, the monthly tier costs $20 per month.

Happy Ring's concept is an extension of where Wearables have been headed. In the past few years, there has been a shift towards stress management, sleep tracking, and even meditation. This was accelerated after the outbreak of the swine flu. Is the Happy Ring able to play ball with what is already out there?