Smart rings: the fitness tracker on your finger

Make like Prince Harry and wear your fitness tracker on your finger. Katie Strick has a guide to the new micro-wearables 
Oura

Fitbits are getting smaller and the latest Apple Watch is ultra-lightweight — but even these can feel clunky when you’re wearing them all day and night. Get with the progress: a new wave of high-tech smart rings are putting the power at your fingertips.

Motiv is the trailblazer, and it launched in the UK this month. The micro-wearables start-up was founded by a team of ex-Nasa, Apple and Cisco experts, all of whom have spent five years packing all the features of a typical fitness smartwatch into a sleek, titanium-finished ring. The result is impressively small. The band is less than 0.1in thick and it’s lighter than a penny.

“You’ll forget it’s even there,” says CEO Tejash Unadkat, who launched Motiv in Selfridges last week.

Like your Apple Watch or Fitbit, the ring contains an optical heart-rate sensor and accelerometer to track your heart rate, calories burned, distance and steps, though the main focus is “active minutes”: the amount of time you exert energy through “moderate-intensity aerobic activity”. Regular walking doesn’t count. To up your score, you have to pick up the pace.

Oura’s micro-wearable tracks activity and sleep
Oura

The ring is waterproof to 50m and integrates with Alexa, Google Fit and Apple Health, but security is number one so your data is protected. You can only access the app using the fingerprint scanner or facial-recognition features on your phone. Link it to your PC to set up a bespoke unlock gesture — like turning your hand over — for an extra layer of security. We’re in sci-fi territory.

Crucially, Motiv’s size also makes it a clever sleep tool. “Because there isn’t a clunky wristwatch (or a bright screen) interfering with your sleep, users are more inclined to wear their ring all night,” Unadkat continues. He says this helps to generate more consistent data and feedback.

Sleep is a focal point for all of these new micro-wearables. Prince Harry was recently spotted wearing Oura, a high-end sleep-tracking ring that tracks your metrics 24/7 and was named CES’s Best of Innovation Award honoree in 2016.

Prince Harry was seen with an Oura ring on the royal tour last month
Getty Images

The devil is in the detail: Oura packs in multiple sensors, from pulse measurement to a 3D accelerometer and body temperature gauge to track three metrics: activity, sleep and readiness. It then makes tailored suggestions for how to drift off more easily — crucial, when there’s a royal baby on the way.

Hot on Oura’s heels is Go2Sleep, an AI-powered sleep tracker that uses the capillaries on your fingers to provide more detailed data than wrist devices can manage. The ring, which smashed its target on Indiegogo earlier this year, also has an intelligent alarm clock function and even claims that it can track your tossing and turning during the night.

The ring comes in numerous colours
Oura

Meanwhile, Montreal-based start-up Blinq offers luxury smart jewellery. The device is disguised as a sterling silver or 12-karat gold ring but pair it with your phone and it becomes high-tech: the ring offers standard activity tracking, uses a special glow technology to illuminate the gemstone to a custom colour whenever you get a notification, so you won’t miss important calls, and has a special SOS alert feature if you’re ever in danger. Tap out a custom sequence on your ring and Blinq will send a text to your friends.

The Future of Wearables

Experts estimate that the fitness wearables market could be worth as much as $45 billion (about £35 million) by the year 2020, and represent as many as 250 million units.

Apple has a market share of 17 per cent, made up of 3.4 million shipments. Its latest device, the Apple Watch 4 — released during the company’s huge September showcase — is primed to send you a low heart rate notification. If your heart rate falls below a defined threshhold for more than 10 minutes while you are inactive, it can be a symptom of bradycardia.

Apple Watch 4

San Francisco start-up Bellabeat recently launched a hydration tracker, Spring, which tracks your water intake. Enter details including activity levels, height, weight and the temperature, and Spring will work out how much water you should be drinking, and nudge you if you’re running low.

You’re never too young to monitor your vital stats: Fitbit has released a new band, the Ace, designed to be worn by children aged eight and over. It monitors steps, sleep and lets children compete in step challenges against other kids. Garmin goes even younger: its Vivofit JR is pitched at kids aged four-plus. Don’t worry, they won’t share your kids’ data with third parties.

Bellabeat hydration tracker

This summer, Fitbit (finally) introduced female health tracking to its features.

In the US, fitness trackers have been used as evidence in murder cases. Last month, data from a Fitbit was used to charge a man accused of murdering his step-daughter: her Fitbit showed a serious spike in heart rate then a swift slowdown in the same metric during the 15-minute period he was said to have been at her house.

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