Review: Ultrahuman Ring Air

Once the preserve of biohacking billionaires, celebrities, and athletes, smart rings have grown enormously in popularity since the Oura ring first launched in 2015. The ability to track your health through an unobtrusive piece of jewelry still feels like a miniaturization miracle. Now there's another smart ring to take note of in this nascent category: the Ultrahuman Ring Air.

Clearly positioned as a competitor for the third-generation Oura, the Ultrahuman Ring Air is technically very similar. It can track your sleep, recovery, and movement to offer insights and tips via an app on your smartphone. It is also similarly priced at $349, but that price includes a “lifetime subscription” to access your data and insights, whereas Oura charges $6 per month. I've worn the Ultrahuman Ring Air for a couple of months, and it is a delightfully easy way to track your health and sleep, but it’s not so great for fitness, and I encountered a few flaws.

Photograph: Ultrahuman

I used a sizing kit, wearing a dummy ring for 24 hours to find the ideal fit, which turned out to be size 11. (Size 10.5 would have been better, but Ultrahuman doesn't do half sizes.) Ultrahuman has an electronic sizing kit you can use that involves using your phone's camera, but you can have the company ship you a Ring Air Sizing Kit for free.

I chose to wear the titanium ring on my left index finger—the only rule is you can't wear it on thumbs and pinkies. If I could choose again, I'd go with my middle or ring finger because I quickly discovered that the ring gets scuffed easily, and on your index finger, it has more contact with everything you pick up. I tested the matte black version, but Ultrahuman has since released other finishes (shiny black, gold, or silver), which may not scuff as easily.

The Ultrahuman Ring Air solves two problems I typically have with sleep and fitness trackers. First, it’s comfortable enough to wear all the time, even to bed for sleep tracking. I find smartwatches and most fitness trackers uncomfortable and prefer to take them off at night. Second, the Ring Air offers insights into your data and nudges you toward healthier habits. Some fitness trackers give you a data dump but lack practical advice and insights.

Photograph: Ultrahuman

Design-wise, the Ring Air is chunky and masculine (it's around 2.5 millimeters thick). It is noticeable enough that a few people asked me about it, but I’m not much of a jewelry wearer. The sensors are packed around the inside, but it’s smooth and comfortable. Smaller sizes only weigh 2.4 grams, but my ring is a little heavier at around 3 grams. I occasionally see the green light of the heart rate sensor if it’s dark, but it's easily the subtlest wearable I've worn.

There's an infrared photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor, a noncontact medical-grade skin temperature sensor, a six-axis motion sensor, and colored LEDs for heart rate monitoring and blood oxygen saturation. It’s fine to wear in the shower or pool thanks to the IPX8 water resistance rating.

You can review your data in the Ultrahuman app on your phone (Android, iOS). The ring connects via Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (LE), taking a few seconds to sync every time you open it. Ultrahuman crunches your data to offer three scores: Your movement index, sleep index, and a recovery score. The first two are for fitness and sleep, respectively, and they inform the recovery score, which indicates how hard you should push yourself that day. It's not unlike Fitbit's Daily Readiness score or Garmin's Body Battery.

Photograph: Ultrahuman

For movement, the Ring Air counts your steps, logs exercise, and estimates your cardiovascular fitness and blood oxygen levels (sadly, these last two are not available in the Android app yet). I like that it focuses on movement throughout the day and nudges you to stir when you have been sedentary for too long. Regular movement is prized over one big workout if you're sitting at your desk for hours.

Unfortunately, the workout tracking, which is still in beta, is flaky. You have to trigger it manually, and the activity options are limited. The Ultrahuman app shows heart rate zones and calories burned at the end of the workout. Twice, I started tracking workouts, only to have the data disappear. The Ring Air also consistently fails to record my heart rate accurately. I can hit 150 beats per minute on the Apple Watch, but the Ring Air often says I’m still at 80 bpm or less. Since it is a work in progress, I'm keeping my fingers crossed it improves. My heart rate outside of workouts appears to be accurate and matches other trackers.

Where the Ultrahuman Ring Air has been strongest is sleep tracking. I recently wrote a sleep tracker guide, comparing data across devices, and the Ring Air came closest to an accurate reflection of my slumber. It breaks out the stages (awake, REM, light, and deep), shows your heart rate variability (HRV), and tracks skin temperature. You can also log how you feel (tired, ready for action, or somewhere in between).

The Ring Air makes suggestions based on your circadian rhythm and the time of day. Get sunlight in the morning, delay stimulants until adenosine has cleared, and remember to stop drinking coffee toward the end of the day. It also uses heart rate drop as an indicator of recovery (if your heart rate drops earlier in the night, you recover better) and suggests reasons why it may not have fallen as quickly, such as meals too close to bedtime or alcohol. This is all commonsense stuff, and there’s a fair bit of unnecessary jargon when simpler language would suffice, but it helps to get nudges throughout the day.

The app can feel complex at first, but dig into any of the elements being tracked or extrapolated, and you will find an explanation of why this metric is important and what it tells you. The color coding helps, with green indicating that a measurement is within your target range and red highlighting potential problems.

Ultrahuman also compiles a weekly report showing trends to highlight where you have improved and what needs further improvement. Stat junkies will love this, but it might be overwhelming if you prefer a simple overview. There is also a tab with meditations, workouts, and sleep stories. There’s a fair bit of content in there, and the production values are good.

Sadly, one tab in the app is just an advert for Ultrahuman’s M1 glucose monitoring patch. The app has had multiple updates since I started testing, so it is improving. But I think the event logging is clunky. As well as recording workouts, you can log activities or sleep after the fact, log what you eat, and input your weight. There’s an “Other” category for anything else you want to record. But the app could do a better job of integrating all of this data.

Most fitness trackers allow you to set goals or adjust them based on your lifestyle, but this option is missing from the Ultrahuman Ring Air. It can be a little dispiriting to keep missing goals, and Ultrahuman’s insistence that I get 11,000 steps in every day is unrealistic for me, so I hope they allow some tweaking in the future.

Photograph: Ultrahuman

Overall, I am a fan of the Ultrahuman Ring Air. It's lovely to have such an elegant device tracking my health. I find the reminders genuinely useful. The Ultrahuman team also seems to be adding functionality at a steady pace. When I had a problem, the in-app support person was swift and helpful. (I switched from an Android phone to my iPhone, but it refused to sync. I had to delete the app and reinstall it to get it working.)

Battery life is solid. Ultrahuman suggests up to six days, but four days is more realistic. The app nags you to charge when the battery hits around 20 percent. A wee charging pedestal and USB-C cable come in the box, but you’ll need your own power adapter. The Ring Air takes more than two hours to fully charge, which is enough time to forget about it, and I missed a couple of nights of data because of this.

The obvious alternative is the Oura. It offers a more polished and accessible experience, plus workout tracking that's far more usable, but Oura has a sizable head start on Ultrahuman, and the fact you don’t need a subscription for the Ring Air is a big plus. It takes a few weeks to get valuable insights, but with enough data, trends emerge to help you identify potential reasons for poor sleep or how ready you are for a workout. I can’t say I feel like an ultrahuman yet, but the Ring Air is nudging me in the right direction.