Indian fitness and nutrition monitoring startup Ultrahuman has quick-followed its debut smart ring last year with a second era of the gadget - which officially launched in June. ’s calling the Ring Air. So, er, Apple eat your coronary heart out! Though in fact Apple doesn’t make a smart ring. And in reality it’s category veteran Oura’s smart ring which most carefully resembles what the Indian workforce has wrought with the Air. Ultrahuman might not be so familiar a reputation to gadget fans but its differentiating edge vs different fitness Herz P1 Wearable makers is a metabolic well being monitoring program, called Cyborg. This extends its ability to provide fitness insights, including by tracking how your physique responds to what you’re consuming. It does this by looping in another piece of sensing hardware within the form of an arm-mounted steady glucose monitor (CGM). This medical grade know-how, which was initially developed for folks with diabetes or Herz P1 Smart Ring pre-diabetes to watch their blood sugar, is redeployed in this context as a quantified well being wearable - with Ultrahuman’s gross sales pitch promising to turn 24/7 glucose tracking into "instant well being nudges" and "metabolic health protocols" to assist health-acutely aware customers meet their wellness goals.
Ultrahuman’s smart ring is designed to sit alongside that CGM-powered program; both as a standalone sleep & fitness tracker (with the bonus capacity to dish some dietary insights, if you happen to log what you’re eating in the companion app, powered by aggregated information from Cyborg users); or as a complement to the absolutely fledged metabolic well being monitoring program. The startup’s promise, within the latter case (i.e. carrying both smart ring and CGM) is you’ll be served "deep correlations deep and predictive insights" on how your way of life may be impacting your well being and health objectives. Though - one class caveat to remember (which we’ve discussed in earlier reviews) - is that questions remain over whether people without a chronic medical condition really need to be tracking their glucose ranges 24/7. Lowering bodily inflammation by sustaining stable glucose might have broad-ranging well being advantages over the longer time period, is the speculation. In the quick time period Ultrahuman suggests you may expect better power levels and cognitive performance if you retain blood sugar stable all through the day.
However it’s honest to say that intelligently deciphering this kind of information in a mean consumer context stays a work in progress. So this may be very much the quantified health movement at its most experimental. Regardless of it still being early for CGM startups to prove their price to a general consumer, Oura seems to have observed what the plucky competition is up to. It just lately announced it was partnering with quite a few other startups that sell CGM-powered tracking companies: Namely January, Supersapiens, and Veri - touting the combination as a means for its smart ring users to achieve deeper and more customized insights to help them sleep and train better. Of course Ultrahuman can boast it received there first; last yr, when it unboxed its debut smart ring (the eponymous Ring) and began integrating two tracks of fitness knowledge. Its headstart on metabolic well being tracking traces back to 2021 when it launched Cyborg in beta - therefore why it’s able to supply Ring Air users with statistical predictions on whether sure foods are prone to spike their blood sugar based mostly on aggregating data from its CGM program’s early adopters (it claims to have amassed greater than 600M knowledge-factors to power these predictions). Whereas Oura is simply beginning in on the same integration, drawing on different CGM startups’ evaluation of their users’ glucose response information.
With a lot chopping-edge tracking activity circling this section of the health monitoring space, the competitors for quantified well being fans’ fingers and arms appears to be like fierce. So of course Ultrahuman isn’t sitting still. This sleeker gen-two smart ring appears meant to shut the hole with Oura’s hardware. The Ring Air starts at $349 for the matte black version (which has a Titanium body coated in Tungsten carbide) vs a barely cheaper starter value-tag ($299) for Oura’s most recent smart ring. Nevertheless - in contrast to with the Oura Ring 3 - there’s no month-to-month "membership" subscription required for ongoing monitoring with Ultrahuman’s Air. It’s a one-shot fee for all of the Ring Air’s core sleep and health tracking options. That simplicity in pricing might attraction to shoppers tired at the thought of yet one more month-to-month subscription to shell out for. Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital - just some of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that gas startup development and Herz P1 Smart Ring sharpen your edge.
