Smart rings have a long way to go

There is a new form factor waiting in the wings: smart rings. According to Korean outlet Naver, the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent for a smart ring from the company. It will take a long time before this kind of futuristic smart ring is ready for prime time.

There are many reasons why smart rings are attractive. They are more discreet, fingers are better for heart rate measurement, and rings are more comfortable than watches. They would be a good health tracker. They pose more engineering and technical challenges than a watch.

The Oura Ring is the only consumer smart ring that you have heard of. The ring is perfectly round. It looks nice, but it doesn't do anything differently than the Gen 3. It is easy to dismiss this update as a change in appearance. When I first heard about it, I did. Tom Hale, Oura's CEO, told me that a perfectly round smart ring is an engineering challenge. It is difficult to get a battery that is small enough to fit into a ring and flexible enough to hold a curved shape. Most smart rings have a flat edge in the design.

Image: Oura

Consumer smart rings are at that location. Hardware innovation is making something round. The smart ring isn't the only one that has software-based innovations. The Oura Ring can be found on a watch. Its approach to recovery tracking is one of the best.

I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of companies made smart rings with EKG capabilities. The Prevention Circul Plus is one of the ones that does it. It's the "smarter" features like controlling your TV, delivering notifications, or interacting with your phone that I'm most leery of.

Smart rings were trying to do more. Ringly was a $200 ring that vibrated and lit up when you got a notification, but it didn't have a screen so you had to memorize what combination of buzzing and lights meant. If you were out of range, it wouldn't work. The Motiv Ring started out as a simple fitness tracker. I didn't get it to do anything. Smart rings are at their best when they are easy to use.

When they are easy to understand, smart rings are at their best.

The Oura Ring is the one that has been around for a long time because it is a single minded device. It is a recovery tracker that gathers health data from your fingers. Oura has done a lot to make sense of that data. Working with other health and fitness apps has made its data valuable. It is a $300 data collector that comes with a $6 a month subscription. I like my Oura Ring, but it costs a lot more to own one than it does to use it.

The paradoxes are that. Smart rings don't work well outside of health tracking. Continuous data can potentially provide a lot of insights for clinical research. There are some interesting smart ring ideas being thrown around. Happy Health just got a ton of funding for a ring to gauge mental health and Ultrahuman is working on a smart ring to hack your metabolism.

Everything a smart ring can do is possible with a smartwatch.

I think use cases are more interesting to researchers than consumers. Consumers want the best bang for their buck, and a smart ring can do everything, but a watch can.

Patents aren't a guarantee that a product will be released The patent tells us that the idea of a smart ring is a big part of the strategy of the company. My guess is that this is one patent that won't see the light of day for a long time, unless SAMSUNG can figure out a killer reason why consumers would want a "Galaxy Ring" and control a TV definitely isn't it. Ifever.

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