Oura Ring is getting a new feature called “heart rate zones”, adapting from smart watches like Garmin and Fitbit. It is playing the card of “The replacement of a smart watch”, but is competing further away with smart watches using its own weaknesses.
Without a screen, any insight a smart ring gathered about our body has to be communicated to us through a phone. This kills the convenience advantage of the ring. Who would bother using a ring+phone combination when a watch can do it all. On the other hand, smart rings has to be small physically to be worn as a ring. This makes integration of a screen challenging. Beside, having a tiny screen on our finger doesn’t solve any pressing problem of our life.
Furthermore, limited again by its size, a smart ring have small battery capacity, by far below 30mAh. That means they can’t do much complex computation by themselves. So the ring can only gather data, and let the phone to process the data to give readable insights to the user. Then again, user has to read it somewhere else, not on the ring.
The only card a smart ring can play well is the Strategic Highland where it is located at. A ring is worn on a finger, inside which big blood vessels are located without much optical obstructions. The nearly round shape of a finger allows very good contact of the ring, so that the distance of the optical emitter and receivers inside the ring keep a relatively constant distance to the blood vessels in the finger. So a smart ring receives or can be marketed as receiving more accurate data of our body. Besides that, wearing a ring is more convenient than wearing a watch if the ring is small enough.
However, there is only so much information inside a finger. Temperature, blood flow variation, humidity, that’s about it. The ceiling is there. The other card that smart rings should be playing but not is the fact that we are very “handy”. We do most of our work with hands, not with brain. Smart rings that focus on information gathering should pay attention to this gold mine. Those sophisticated movements of our fingers can be monitored by a smart ring, but not by a smart watch. In an ideal world, a smart ring should be able to record and identify what we are doing, work together with AI, to offer insights or even suggestions on the Doing itself. Of course, it would be stupid to stare at someone’s index finger to try to tell what he is doing. Smart ring should co-work with other smart wearables to increase the data dimension. Wearables like smart belt that can monitor the food digestion, smart earbuds that can monitor core temperature, smart glasses that can monitor the focus point of the user, smart shoes that can monitor the motion and probe the large blood vessel group under the feet, real time recorder that monitor the sound in the environment. When such wearables work together, they offer a multiple dimensional time domain dataset that can characterize the physical behavior of the user. Obviously, even if technically possible, not many people would like to be monitored like this until the data is absolutely protected and the benefits are fully proved. But I believe, just like the raise of ChatGPT, such a day will come where we not only get a personal intelligence assistant in our pockets that tell us the answer to any question, but also get a personal guardian distributed around our body to tell us what went well and what can be improved with the way we use our bodies.