I'm waiting for the Apple Health app support. Supposedly it's coming sometime in the fall. The Google app is ok but I don't use the AI features.

I'm not sure if proper Apple Health would help with this but Google tends to be delayed at automatic recognition of activities (e.g. I take a walk it can be an hour or two until it processes automatically). Apple would recognize a walk as I was on it.

Oh wow, the Cirqa is exactly what I've been looking for: a wrist sensor without subscription and without a screen.

I had a FitBit Charge 4 some years ago, but it stopped working after a couple years.

Then I got a RingConn 2 last year, but like TFA I've decided that I don't like the ring form factor.

I just switched from a Whoop to the Fitbit Air. Whoop wanted $350 for a subscription fee which I just found really ridiculous. It's only been a few days, but the Fitbit Air might even be better at tracking sleep. And it looks like it can periodically, automatically check for Afib unlike the Whoop (?). The rest looks a little worse. But worth it to avoid a subscription fee. Not sure how Whoop stays in business TBH.

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.

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.

TWO! Mine's cobalt as well. My wife picked it out when I'd lost my original gold ring (temporarily, cough). Besides looking interesting, apparently it was much less expensive than gold is these days.

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.

Thank you for everything that you do! I imagine EMTs don't get nearly enough thanks amidst all the rush and horror.

I looked it up and seems they just bash it with hammer? What are you eluding to?

The numbers you are probably referring to are for the market share in any given year.

https://www.jckonline.com/magazine-article/the-knot-2019-jew...

Since people tend to stay married for years, and tungsten wasn't as popular previously, the actual number of adult men wearing tungsten wedding bands is probably a lot lower, maybe around 10%.

Still a lot. Approximately nobody wears them in Germany; seems like an opportunity.

smart rings aren't meant to last more than a couple years though - the rate of progress on these means that you're more likely going to be paying for a smart ring subscription than a physical object

Mine is serinium (a zirconium/titanium/nickel/etc. alloy), because it was cheap (because I was poor and wanted to spend more money on my then-fiancée's, of course). Serinium rings are also not resizable, and, from what I understand, they are becoming more popular (because they are cheap).

Username checks out.

Ever heard of arthritis?

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.

It's usually not the primary benefit of the exercise. You are not going to maintain zone 2 (120-140 bpm) while lifting.

The data should be useful for automatically counting reps...

If you constrain the device to ‘fitness tracker” and not lifestyle/sleep/health/illness/fitness telemetry, sure.

I wear an Oura Ring for the complete suite of telemetry, not just for tracking workouts.

I also lift, I’ll take the ring off for heavy lifts, and keep it on for every other exercise (unless I feel there’s a risk that the ring could get caught on the equipment, in which case I’ll take it off for those reps too). Granted this is in my home gym, so there’s no inconvenience to me doing this.

I’ll rest between exercises and that’s when I make the call to keep the ring on or not [for the subsequent exercise].

I still get most of the insights and the Oura ring app lets me to tell it that I was doing strength training, which allows it to guesstimate calorie usage based on duration.

Of course that’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for people who are interested in health metrics without being obsessed with them (which is just probably a better idea unless you’re a pro athlete).

The workout tracking is kinda the least interesting aspect for me. It’s more about the long term trends of activity, sleep, heart rate, stress, etc.

Also, it’s worth saying, I went with a ring rather than a watch or a band because I like to wear a real watch.

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.

I'm guessing that strongly depends on how big the hospital is. I know someone who lives out in the boonies and it's amazing what isn't on hand.

I've been wearing them all my life all over North America. Very few industries require metal-free footwear. Composite toes (since we're getting carried away with various terms, that's the actual term and fabrication method, which is fiber mesh and epoxy) still have downsides. Those don't apply if you're a white collar guy and just need them because of regulations.

But if you're an actual worker that relies on them to save your toes, CT has much worse puncture resistance than ST. So it's trivial to puncture with a framing nail gun or cut through it if you rest a board on your toe, for example.

They also shatter when something heavy falls on them. If the thing bounces and you're quick enough to pull your foot, then great. If not, the second bounce will be shattering your toes and your boot will be filled with fleshy composite soup that is impossible to save. A steel toe in that situation will just bend and odds are good that your foot will be salvageable.

Tungsten also shatters. It doesn’t crush. That’s actually how a tungsten ring that’s stuck is removed. You break it with a vice.

Amen. As an EMT/Firefighter you'll never catch me wearing a ring made of any kind of metal. I have seen and dealt with some pretty horrific things. Degloving is the only traumatic injury that makes me queasy to think about.

I loved my first tungsten wedding ring so much I got another one when I remarried. It has a really satisfying feeling of solidity. Your safety concern does not trouble me at all: yes, it's a very hard metal, but it's brittle. You can't cut a stuck tungsten ring loose the way you can a gold ring, but you can easily break it, using a hammer or a pair of vice-grips.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Y2gzBI-2amA

My ring has a "comfort fit" profile, and it slips off so smoothly I can't imagine why this would ever be necessary.

Adulting: buying rings that are the right size.

He did buy it at the right size. Then he lost weight.

There aren't many places where a wearable doesn't get in the way, even an Apple watch it's unusable if you do kettlebell training (I severely scratched one doing a kb snatch).

I also stopped wearing my wedding ring because of lifting, it mangled beyond all recognition and had to cut it off with pliers and send it for repair.

That is what I wear - when I bother wearing one at all. Or sometimes the cheaper rubber rings, depending on what is in stock at the store. They are cheap enough that I don't worry about losing them. When (not if!) they break I just get a new one. My gold ring stays hidden at home where I don't have to worry about it.

I've never got used to the feel of a ring on my fingers though and now I do without. I know I'm married and girls never "hit on me", so I really don't need it for anything.

I wear silicone ring in the gym, in my workshop, and working on or sailing boats and a platinum band when I'm not doing manual stuff. I could wear no ring at all, but I don't particularly like the optics of an obviously married man with tan lines on ring finger not wearing his ring: I think it makes you look like there's something wrong with you - recently divorced at best, a sleazy creep at worst. Should I care? No, but I'm not that well adjusted. Silicone is basically as safe as no ring at all for almost any manual or physical activity. Metal rings offer an entire exciting catalog of spectacularly horrible accidents for the low price of one tiny slip.

So, yes, it's literally a social signal that I'm in a relationship :)

I wear a silicone wedding band. The "durable memento" went missing when I took it off at the gym. My wife bought me a new gold band for our 15th anniversary and it lives in my jewelry box, since I don't want to lose it.

I have a soft gold ring, and I lift. I take my ring off to lift or it would get absolutely destroyed.

Same problems that regular rings have, yet people still wear them.

In some jobs/hobbies, it is highly recommended to wear soft metal rings, and add a structural weakness to the ring in order to limit finger injuries, in case you forget to remove it.

Doesn't mean everyone must do it, but as with this post, it's a good point of view to get before making a choice: not everyone rides horses, but the same injuries can happen in everyday life.

Most people don't even lift.

It’s about any physical activity involving hands and friction. Rock climbing, basketball, tennis, etc. Perhaps this depends on intensity. Still, much more than just lifting.

People who don’t usually wear rings might not realize this.

I think what we might be moving towards is the idea that rings are kinda dumb.

Rings make our fingers less mobile, harder to clean, get in the way of our delicate hand-tasks, scratch things our hands are manipulating, yada yada.

Earings make much more sense. Or bracelets. What about Torques?

My wife and I both just stopped wearing our wedding bands, and it turns out you’re still married even if you’re not wearing the ring. Also we just have simple gold bands so we never spent much on them in the first place.

My Oura Ring picked up on breathing fluctuations that my Garmin did not detect.

However my Oura Ring was also very battery-constrained so it also only looked at heart rate every few minutes. My Garmin measured it every second.

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-...).

What's the new device?

I reached out to their chatbot after my battery life tanked a year-or-so later and it sent me a replacement no questions asked.

I hit add comment, went off to do the dishes while I thought about what I wanted to say and didn't refresh. Sorry!

OK as always there are more ways for markets to split than analysis tells at the beginning. Interestingly enough this is probably also a good part of the luxury market.

I have always hated watches until I had a reasonably good one for a year, and lost it because ADHD just does not handle keeping track of things well.

But it seems to me people who refuse smart watches for normal watches probably are not doing so for crappy watches (and if you are for the rest of the post I shall assume you are the outlier). They must be reasonably luxurious brands that are preferred, as such there is a larger amount of the luxury market who might like smart rings (but this also seems off to me, who the hell wants to wear a crappy looking ring, in the luxury market.)

Maybe however the multiple watches look might catch on, like the stand-up routine of Harry Anderson the guy who used to play the judge on Night Court. He was a guy who could wear two or three watches on each hand, and maybe a couple on his ankles. That was style right there.

Same, I got a Withings watch, which is both

It is useless to have smart rings do the primary stuff of what a smart watch does

Is it? I don't really like wearing watches and certainly have no interest in a smart watch. It's also deductible from my HSA whereas personal security (??????) isn't and also costs significantly more?

You can export all data in xml

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-your-health-dat...

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.

Colmi smart rings have a reverse-engineered Bluetooth protocol, so you can use Gadgetbridge instead of the official QRing app and keep everything local.

Pebble Index!

The bluetooth protocol has been reverse-engineered and you can run everything locally with https://github.com/Th0rgal/open_oura

If you're in an industry where that's a real risk, then sure, but rings are ancient.

Totally not what you're talking about, but I've lost a ring while taking off wet gloves. Fortunately someone had explained to me this was a common way to lose a ring, and I checked the gloves before the ring dropped out.

I doubt AI hallucinations had anything to do with it

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 ?

I can estimate a portion of rice within about 5-10% without a scale, but I needed the scale to learn what the portion was in the first place.

same thing applies to the ring!

I have sleep apnea. I have noted discussions online where people have used oura data to tune their cpap. I was wondering if anyone had used a smart watch for the same. I read that Garmin had worse sleep tracking, but more opinions would be handy

Yeah, I found its made me much more aware of and focused on eating early, getting to sleep early, staying on a consistent sleep schedule, etc.

I like my oura ring but I find its terrible for fitness tracking. It takes nowhere near enough readings to actually get an idea of what zones my heart rate is in. I have a Wahoo Tickr that I use when I cycle or play tennis and the difference between it and the Oura ring is huge.

How has all your data changed your sleep and do you think you could have made changes without that data?

A lot of people seem to buy fitness trackers merely to verify they sleep poorly, and then do nothing about it.

Never saw the point of smart watches either. Maybe if you're diabetic?

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 all these same complaints about regular rings.

The only thing my body tells me in the morning is.. "dude coffee now". I have no problem falling asleep, but I usually wake up pretty early. I feel ok with 6 hours of sleep, but I don't think that is optimally healthy. I don't worry about it a lot, but I look at sleep duration, heart rate, hrv, and sleep debt. The details motivate me to pay attention to sleep hygiene. If I ignored it, I don't think I would sleep enough.

How would you know if you never tested your intuition against the metrics?

Aye allow rings - silicone is all I can tolerate; like to use my hands!

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.

My form factor is more like a micro joycon but sits on your wrist like a fitness band & if you flick it hard enough the magnetic thingy will just come into your palm, do whatever like scroll, delete/archive emails, close tabs etc & then flick it back onto your wrist for it to attach magnetically

Selling somebody who owns a $4000 watch another watch is an uphill battle

I’d wager the future lifetime spending of someone who owns a $4000 watch on other watches is at least one and maybe two orders of magnitude greater than the general population.

Perhaps you could reinforce both the outside and the inside, so any swelling would be directed parallel to the finger?

Wdym "seen no one mention"? This case was so much "all over the news" it might as well have been a psyop.

And yet it was exactly one case.

Oura Ring 5 has solved all my issues with prior versions

Most people would be better off doing one sleep study. Depth over breadth

I loved my Oura Ring 3, but one day it just stopped working, and it was past the warranty period so that I couldn't get a replacement. I thought it was stiff to pay _another_ $300 for a new ring.

At first, I thought I could try to fix it myself. But I found that the repairability scores for the Oura Ring are atrocious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqCp-z9WAkA

Even looking at Pebble's new voice ring, it's designed to be thrown away when the battery runs out. I like the idea of smart rings, but they seem wasteful and products not really built to last.

AirPods already do HRM and some people already put random stuff on their ears

There was a trend of non-diabetic people wearing huge glucose monitoring patches on their arms

I don't see how an earlobe cuff would be a deterrent for non-athletes with the right marketing

And marketing it's all the rage since those people don't need those gadgets in the first place

The OP mentions he switched to a Google FitBit Air which seems like an elastic cloth band which is all I want too, except I want it to operate like an Apple Watch in terms of integration with Apple Health. Anyone know if the FitBit Air and Apple Watch are similar in features?

These would be a nightmare to wear for kettlebells.

I have a gold wedding band and can have it resized if needed. Also, I don't wear my wedding band when exercising, and that doesn't reduce its utility for me much. But a health tracker ring is arguably at its most useful when worn during exercise, to having to take it off while working out is not great. This isn't limited to weight lifting, as others hav noted. It also applies to tennis or other racquet sports where it gets in the way, and to anyone whose hands swell significantly during exercise. I find that even long walks make my fingers swell quite a bit. So I'd either have to get a ring that's loose during everyday wear or take it off during intensive exercise.

I got the Garmin Lily 2 Active. It’s an attractive simple watch. For sleep and activity tracking without GPS it’s great. It also has GPS but I use my phone for tracking biking. The big thing is that after configuring it with the Garmin app you can tell Garmin they don’t have permission to store your data in the cloud, and then use iOS settings to block the app from even talking to the watch. Then I vibe coded an app for my Linux system that syncs over Bluetooth. Once per day I turn off Bluetooth on my phone and press the button in the web app and my Ubuntu desktop pulls all the files and displays them in my web ui. It’s really nice and my data is reasonably private (Claude can see it though I could fix that). I recommend the watch!

Doesn't sound like a complaint against "smart" rings; more like a general complaint against rings.

Also sounds like the author has done a great deal of work to improve himself, physically, and I can respect (and hat tip) to it, but he would definitely see the same issue with a wedding ring (except that you can usually resize those).

I wear my wedding ring constantly; even in the shower. I'm old-fashioned, and haven't really changed that much, since I got married (besides getting grayer and wrinklier).

I just wish a ring can detect 2.4GHz EM and flash with LEDs.