Smart rings are inherently invisible, and that’s the problem

Sometimes, when you’re lying in bed, the glow from your smart ring’s optical heart rate sensor seeps into your peripheral vision. This got me thinking about how Samsung (and possibly Apple) might get into the smart ring market, and why it would be a bad idea. You will find that these companies want the device to make a presence in your life and integrate it into your daily routine. But wisdom rings deliberately blend into the background, which limits what you can or want to do with them.

Back in February, Samsung released the Galaxy Ring, a health-tracking wearable device built into a ring. When it launches later this year, it will continuously monitor your sleep, breathing, movement and reproductive cycles. Total coincidence, I’m sure, Bloomberg Reports say Apple is also investigating its own smart ring platform. Both companies are secretly targeting Oura Ring, the market leader in finger-mounted wearables. I’ve been testing one of these for a long time.

Oura tracks your sleep, body temperature, activity, recovery and menstrual cycle. Packing so much technology into such a small and elegant package is an engineering marvel. The downside, if you can call it that, is that there’s no way to access the data the ring collects or its insights unless you have a phone handy.

But here’s the thing: I don’t often find myself actually opening the app to see the stats. If I wake up feeling terrible, there’s usually a reason that’s self-explanatory and requires no further explanation. On the rare occasions when I wake up and don’t know why I feel bad, the last thing I want to do is check my phone. Who wants to look at fine-grained data when your head is spinning and your eyes can’t focus?

This friction, the small gap between the existence of information and its ease of access, is a problem. Yes, you will be notified if your Readiness Score (Oura’s proprietary metric for overall health) falls below a certain level. But I’ve been using this thing long enough that I’ve never gotten into the habit, and I suspect others have a hard time doing it, too. On the rare occasions when I fully consider and look at my data over a longer period of time, it’s nice to have access to this information. But I can’t imagine myself looking at this data once or twice a day.

It’s also not that useful for workout tracking, mostly because you don’t want to risk spending a $300 gadget at the gym. When I first took it to work out, I picked up a pair of metal dumbbells, realized their knurled handles were rubbing against the metal of the ring, and quickly took them off.

Since there is no direct input method, it is easy to forget that it exists and not take advantage of its information. If you’re all about using the ring to track your fitness because you don’t wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker, and you’re always checking your stats, then it’ll work for you. But deep down, I prefer a watch with a display that’s easy to check intuitively. I think this is something that Samsung and Apple should be looking at as they look to get into this space. Smart rings cater to a niche within a niche – the quantified self-obsessed who refuse to wear a watch. They clearly believe this is enough to entice them to invest time and money in building their own product, but I’m not sure it’s going to be a big hit.

Not to mention these rings only have a few hooks to keep users in their specific corporate bubble. Apple and Samsung both have dedicated health-tracking apps, and whoever buys one of them will likely have fewer reasons to switch providers in the future. But compared with watches, watches provide health tracking, messaging, app interaction and mobile payment functions. Smartwatches are beneficial to these platforms because they help integrate various functions of mobile phones. Not so with rings.

Maybe it’s another scenario where tech giants now just copy and destroy smaller rivals instead of working hard to develop new products. Smart rings cater to a small market, although big tech companies can dominate with very little time and effort. Especially given the strength of its associated brands, this means these devices will more or less market themselves to die-hard fans. But can this be achieved with new products in 2024? Can or should we expect these companies to do this?