Smart rings promise better physical and mental health, but do they work? I tested three of them | Canada Voices

The first time I learned of the Oura ring was about a year and a half ago. A friend who was an editor at Goop was raving about how it had helped her sleep. But she was also encouraging me to try mouth tape, so I was, admittedly, skeptical.

At the time, Oura and other smart rings seemed popular only among the fitness bros and wellness junkies. Since then, they have popped up everywhere. For the uninitiated, these wearable devices track everything from fitness and hormonal cycles to sleep quality and stress levels. And, unlike the clunky Apple Watch or Fitbit, they’re discreet, with all of the data collected from a small band around the finger.

The rings appealed to me. I’m no fitness bro or wellness junkie. I’m 42, and, generally, in good health. I am, however, a working parent of a small child. I struggle with sleep, stress and balance. And I spend too much time on my phone wondering, often, whether I’m doing enough to stay healthy. The rings promised to help with all of this. They promised a better, more balanced version of me.

So, I engaged in an experiment: I would spend two months wearing three of the most popular rings available in Canada.

My highly unscientific testing began in late fall. I chose the Oura ring 4 (the original smart ring brand first launched in 2015); the Ultrahuman Ring Air (aimed at athletes and tech types) and the RingConn Gen 2 Air (the most budget-friendly option) – the brands provided me with the rings to test and review. It would take at least a few weeks’ wear for them to gather baseline data before providing recommendations.

“Hello Cyborg,” the package from Ultrahuman said when it landed on my doorstep. That might have been a deterrent, if I wasn’t too tired to care.

After plugging in some basic biographical detail – age, sex, weight, height – I was ready to go.

A few weeks in:

All three rings operate on a similar basis. They track movement with 3-D accelerometers, measure blood oxygen levels and heart rate with photoplethysmography sensors (which emit red and infrared light into the skin), and they all have temperature sensors to track menstrual cycles, or signs of sickness.

The data are filtered through various algorithms to generate daily metrics, or “scores,” around sleep, activity level, stress and overall wellness.

I was hooked from the start. Each morning, I’d wake up and check my sleep score. Any number lower than 80 would prompt a full forensic: Was it the glass of wine from the night before? Or dinner too close to bedtime? This helped to establish patterns.

And after working out, I’d check the apps to see how many calories I’d burned, which heart rate zones I’d reached, how my VO2 max measured. I liked the satisfaction of seeing the work laid out in front of me. I liked the dopamine hit from a good score.

But one afternoon, I was at a friend’s house. She mentioned, innocently, that her Oura ring activity score that day was 97.

My anxious mind took over. Ninety-seven! When I’d been content with 89! I decided to do more – more steps, more exercise. An extra run, and then a third, fourth Pilates class. Instead of finding balance, the rings seemed to trigger my worst, most competitive instinct. It felt like another optimization trap.

I had other concerns too. Even with all of the brands’ promises around data security, I wondered whether it was a good idea to hand even more of my personal information over to Big Tech. And then there was the Cyborg of it all – the question of whether the devices were actually helping me listen to my own body, or just getting in the way. Around this time, I showed my husband how the Oura app lets me “feel” my own heartbeat, in real time, using my phone’s vibrations. He wasn’t impressed.

“You know how else you can feel your heart beat?” he asked. And then he looked me dead in the eye and placed his hand on his heart. Touché.

The end point:

My opinion changed about two months in. On one evening, I noticed that my throat felt a little bit scratchy. Am I coming down with something? I wondered. Or just tired?

Before the rings, I might have ignored these symptoms. I might have questioned whether they were real, and instead worked through my discomfort. I would have waited for my body to succumb to full-blown sickness. Instead, the following morning, I opened my Oura app. The landing page had transformed. The screen had darkened, showing angry clouds. My body was experiencing signs of strain, it said. It suggested I focus on recovery. Now I had the validation I needed to rest. I laid low the following day, and felt better by week’s end.

The next week, another epiphany: I had exercised four times that week, and yet my activity scores were stuck at just okay. I dug into the data, and realized what I had missed before – which was that the algorithm accounts for – requires – recovery time in between workouts. It wasn’t lack of exercise that was holding back my score. Instead, it was lack of rest.

I took a rest day, and sure enough, my activity score shot up above 90. This was a revelation. This alone made the experiment – and the inconvenience of wearing three rings at the same time – worth it to me. As ideas, “wellness” or “balance” are opaque. But here were tangible, visible markers that I was giving my body what it needed.

Should you get a smart ring? If you already know how to listen, and trust, your body, then no. But if you struggle like me – and are okay with outsourcing this to yet another device – then the ring might help you get at least part of the way there.

The low-down:

The RingConn is the most budget-friendly option (starting at $290), with the best battery life (about 10 days). But all of the scores the ring provided were often inconsistent with my Ultrahuman and Oura apps, leading me to question its reliability.

With the Ultrahuman ($480), I found the app confusing to navigate, and the bro-y, optimization-focused language on it off-putting. It promised to “power-up” and “super-charge” my health, help me “become CEO“ of my own body.

The Oura offers the best experience, and the most user-friendly app. But it’s not cheap, at $480. And, crucially, you’ll need to pay an additional $10 monthly subscription in order to access all of the app’s functions.