Sensible rings took the tech world by storm final 12 months, however they’re nonetheless comparatively area of interest by way of world gross sales. Samsung apart, most good ring manufacturers are fledgling startups, all making an attempt to make a reputation for themselves in a Wild West business. There isn’t any template for the “proper” solution to make good rings.
So it is no shock that we noticed a variety of good ring options at CES 2025, displaying manufacturers like Ultrahuman, Round, and Evie throwing their darts on the board and seeing what’s going to stick to customers.
We interviewed a number of good ring CEOs round CES, together with Oura’s Tom Hale, and obtained some helpful insights into how they hope to rebrand good rings, whether or not or not it’s medical monitoring, AI insights, or luxurious jewellery. And it will be fascinating to see which angle pays off.
Proactive AI insights into bodily tendencies
Sensible rings acquire a ton of knowledge in your sleep high quality and coronary heart price, with generic explanations for why you may get a nasty rating. Movano Well being, which sells the petite Evie good ring for girls, is trying to make use of “EvieAI” to enhance the actionable insights you get out of your information.
Introduced at CES 2025, the EvieAI Digital Wellness Assistant “generates clear and concise solutions primarily based on articles which have been printed in over 100,000 medical journals…to interpret complicated person queries about nearly any symptom, illness, situation, or process.”
CEO John Mastrototaro, whom we interviewed in regards to the announcement, defined that as a result of the AI can “solely reply with what it is aware of” from “validated medical data,” cross-references with sources like Mayo Clinic for the most effective solutions — whereas ignoring any non-medical questions.
He additionally promised that your questions will stay non-public, with no data despatched again to Movano Well being to be offered to advertisers.
Whereas this preliminary model of EvieAI is a extra generic form of chatbot search engine for medical information, the corporate guarantees that future EvieAI responses will likely be “personalised primarily based on customers’ personal well being metrics, together with coronary heart price, blood oxygen, menstrual cycle data, pores and skin temperature variability, sleep, train, and temper.”
That is one thing that the Oura Ring 4 can already do to some extent with its AI chatbot, and it is that model of EvieAI that sounds essentially the most promising for the way forward for good rings, the place an AI is ” all that information, and if it sees one thing altering in your tendencies…it might deliver that to your consideration,” defined Mastrototaro.
Most of the finest good rings name consideration to destructive tendencies, however a medically-focused AI chatbot might, in principle, present extra personalised and specialised insights into that information than what’s at the moment out there. Whether or not EvieAI can ship “99.9% correct” information on the energy of its sources, as Mastrototaro suggests, will likely be value investigating.
Transitioning from ‘wellness’ to ‘well being’ monitoring
One of many greatest CES good ring bulletins was the Round Ring 2. Whereas the unique Round Ring was skinny and flat-edged with a comparatively brief battery life, the Ring 2 has a extra conventional rounded ring form, an 8-day battery life, and an “FDA-approved” ECG sensor to actively detect potential AFib, tachycardia, and brachycardia.
“All of those [smart ring] manufacturers compete for one thing very comparable, and it is very laborious for customers to distinguish after we’re all providing the identical factor,” defined Round CEO Amaury Kosman throughout a CES interview. Transitioning from conventional “wellness” options like sleep and stress to precise well being and medical data is how they plan to face out from the gang and appeal to B2B gross sales.
Including the ECG meant abandoning Round’s trademark haptics for notifications and alarms, however Kosman sees medical accuracy because the precedence till they’ll match each in a single ring.
Round desires to show its good rings into an at-home different for “costly” and “invasive” medical checks on the physician’s workplace, supplying you with actionable data so that you’re armed with information earlier than you go to the physician. ECGs are the beginning, Kosman says, with future options like “blood strain” and passive AFib detection being labored on.
Whereas many smartwatches have FDA-approved AFib detection, most cease there, solely promising a “wellness” check-in space like blood oxygen. Sensible rings, which may promise a extra actual match in your finger, appear to be pivoting to ship FDA approval in additional areas; working example, Movano Well being obtained FDA approval for its pulse oximeter final December. Mastrototano, too, guarantees the Evie Ring will likely be a “clinical-grade gadget for B2B channels.”
In different phrases, even when customers solely see good rings as a distinct segment novelty for now, that may change if medical doctors advocate at-risk sufferers purchase good rings for correct monitoring rather than costlier and cumbersome gear. If medical firms use their
Attracting the luxurious crowd
Ultrahuman took yet one more rebranding tack at CES when it introduced the Ultrahuman Uncommon. It is a £1,499 good ring fabricated from both 18k gold or 95% platinum, whereas nonetheless providing the identical well being and health instruments because the Ultrahuman Ring Air.
“What units the Uncommon aside…is the complicated engineering that goes into making a sturdy but aesthetic kind issue out of gold, platinum, and rose gold,” Ultrahuman defined in its announcement.
Ultrahuman is not a skin-deep form of firm; it introduced PowerPlugs final 12 months as a solution to broaden what the Ring Air can monitor, and in 2025 revealed its Blood Imaginative and prescient gambit to attach your ring wellness information together with your blood markers for extra actual data. So, its manner ahead is not simply about turning good rings into engaging jewellery.
Nonetheless, even when the Ultrahuman Uncommon has very restricted gross sales, we see aesthetics as an important path ahead for good rings, as all of them are typically so thick and much like each other. They stand out in comparison with the thin, rounded rings that most individuals put on, and that may restrict their attain with customers.
This reveals that if good ring manufacturers transcend the tech house and make them appear engaging luxurious gadgets to mainstream customers, that might be yet one more path for them to develop past their present area of interest. Jewelers and malls have much more promoting attain and clout than little-known tech manufacturers.