Giving up on smart rings(notesbylex.com) |
Giving up on smart rings(notesbylex.com) |
They can even measure blood pressure in lab tests during MOVEMENT at the earlobe
Heartrate, spO2, temperature and it's even a good location for very low level of sound to be heard
Again consumers would never adopt an earlobe cuff, well maybe it was artistic somehow and not heavy/distracting
But athletes would use whatever works
If I had millions I'd invest in development, so steal this idea?
There was a trend of non-diabetic people wearing huge glucose monitoring patches on their arms
I don't see how an earlobe cuff would be a deterrent for non-athletes with the right marketing
And marketing it's all the rage since those people don't need those gadgets in the first place
....I guess OP doesn't wear a wedding ring, or any other kind of ring for that matter? How is that a problem with the smart ring, specifically?
https://cybernews.com/gadgets/samsung-galaxy-smart-ring-batt...
But it's really hard to justify the big picture. It's hundreds of bucks + a monthly subscription for... what, exactly? Why does this need to exist? If you really want to gamify your pulse and sleep patterns for some inconceivable reason, a phone or a wristwatch can collect the same information in a more practical and safer way.
And yet it was exactly one case.
1. Adulting: buying rings that are the right size. eg My tungsten wedding ring cannot be resized either.
2. Most people don't even lift. Those that do, dont mind taking off jewelry. I can see how this would be a problem for someone who wants to wear a smart ring for lifting. Sounds like an issue that should have been noticed earlier.
3. Adulting: moving the ring up and down your soapy finger and washing your hands properly.
It’s in reality a disposable product unfortunately, unlike a wedding band.
I wear an Oura Ring for the complete suite of telemetry, not just for tracking workouts.
I also lift, I’ll take the ring off for heavy lifts, and keep it on for every other exercise (unless I feel there’s a risk that the ring could get caught on the equipment, in which case I’ll take it off for those reps too). Granted this is in my home gym, so there’s no inconvenience to me doing this.
I’ll rest between exercises and that’s when I make the call to keep the ring on or not [for the subsequent exercise].
I still get most of the insights and the Oura ring app lets me to tell it that I was doing strength training, which allows it to guesstimate calorie usage based on duration.
Of course that’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for people who are interested in health metrics without being obsessed with them (which is just probably a better idea unless you’re a pro athlete).
The workout tracking is kinda the least interesting aspect for me. It’s more about the long term trends of activity, sleep, heart rate, stress, etc.
Also, it’s worth saying, I went with a ring rather than a watch or a band because I like to wear a real watch.
An Oura ring appears to be $400, easy to damage, can't be resized. Lots more room for regret there.
Similarly I am not willing to wrap a LiPo battery around one of my fingers. Absolutely not. I suspect this is in part why we have not seen more smartwatch bands doing the same.
A tungsten band is a lot harder than a gold band. But a gold band is already way harder than your flesh. Jimmy Fallon was wearing a traditional platinum band when he nearly lost his finger.
If you want to reduce your risk, you should either not wear a ring or wear a silicone band.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Y2gzBI-2amA
My ring has a "comfort fit" profile, and it slips off so smoothly I can't imagine why this would ever be necessary.
It’s about any physical activity involving hands and friction. Rock climbing, basketball, tennis, etc. Perhaps this depends on intensity. Still, much more than just lifting.
People who don’t usually wear rings might not realize this.
He did buy it at the right size. Then he lost weight.
I also stopped wearing my wedding ring because of lifting, it mangled beyond all recognition and had to cut it off with pliers and send it for repair.
- wrist size changes far less dramatically, and even if it do change, a strap swap for a smartwatch is far cheaper and easier than a whole-device change for a smart ring - wristwatch doesn't interfere with any hand activity - wristwatch far less likely to trap debris from your activities.
In some jobs/hobbies, it is highly recommended to wear soft metal rings, and add a structural weakness to the ring in order to limit finger injuries, in case you forget to remove it.
Doesn't mean everyone must do it, but as with this post, it's a good point of view to get before making a choice: not everyone rides horses, but the same injuries can happen in everyday life.
You do realise that in the (admittedly unlikely) event that needs to be cut off in the Emergency Department, they wont have a chance?
Search YouTube for “break tungsten ring” for examples.
I dimly recall some folks promoting silicone wedding bands, although at that point I think it's more about social-signalling "I'm in a relationship" rather than a durable memento or signalling wealth.
So, yes, it's literally a social signal that I'm in a relationship :)
I've never got used to the feel of a ring on my fingers though and now I do without. I know I'm married and girls never "hit on me", so I really don't need it for anything.
Rings make our fingers less mobile, harder to clean, get in the way of our delicate hand-tasks, scratch things our hands are manipulating, yada yada.
Earings make much more sense. Or bracelets. What about Torques?
It'd be nice to have the information a ring or watch gathers as long as it stayed local. I haven't seen many products offering that though. The thought of not being able to continuously profit from surveillance is just too painful for many companies to bother creating a product aimed at the consumer who doesn't want to be spied on I guess.
I got really upset with Oura when they tried to have their cake and eat it with regards to charging a huge premium for what is a very cheap device and then also a monthly subscription for something that does not need any subscription. I bit the bullet and switched to a Garmin watch for longer battery life and no subscription.
I now have a device that has way more features and lasts significantly longer.
I've had a RingConn ring since December 2024, and I went with them primarily because they don't charge a monthly fee like Oura. But at this point the battery that originally lasted 2 weeks lasts only about 2 days. It's about the best you can expect from a ~30mAh lithium cell. Once it finally dies completely I won't be replacing it.
The most important metric to me was the sleep score and related components. I've noticed my performance (mentally and physically) is tied to sleep in a huge way. I was skeptical that it would capture sleep metrics accurately, but after about a year of use, I can say without question that the number it presents as my sleep score is a very good proxy of how good I feel throughout the day.
My goal for this past year has been to focus on improving sleep health and for that, the ring has been a very useful tool.
YMMV but for me it might be my favorite product I own
Sleep tracking isn't useful as far as trying to improve it for me, because, again, I'm in perimenopause, so my sleep is all over the place and my body just does whatever it wants. But I'm sure it is part of the readiness score or whatever.
I also wear a garmin watch that I mostly use for tracking mountain bike rides, hikes, etc. So I'm just a geek who enjoys gadgets and the data they provide. I like that both have very long battery lives. I would love all the features of an apple watch, but I don't want to be charging it every day.
Does your body not do the same? I really want to like sleep tracking as a feature, but I find that my body already has built in sleep tracking, and the tech version doesn't give me any actionable advice on how to improve my sleep that my biological sleep tracker isn't already giving me.
I'm enjoying it for the same reasons. Longer battery life. More comfortable when I'm sleeping since it has no buttons or weird bulky shape.
I do wish Apple would make their own version of it with apple pay.
The reviews were ~90% 1 & 2 star within the first month of the FitBit Air release.
Three months later, the app has improved to ~80% 1 & 2 star reviews. At this pace, they'll be on v3 of the device when app reviews are decent...
They force everyone to move over to a different app when the replacement app doesn't have all the features/reliability of the old app.
Genius.
Garmin released the Cirqa band at $199 w/o compulsory subscription a few weeks ago. I may switch to that if the FitBit Air acts up.
1. If your finger changes size, spend another $35 for a second one.
2. If it gets scratched to shit, buy another one. Though I lift with my plastic R09 and there's only a bit of scratching around the edge. Other models are metal and should resist scratching better.
3. If it eventually breaks, get another one. Personally I fidget with mine a lot, so removing it before or after washing my hands happens unconsciously.
On top of that, the protocol has been reverse engineered so you can use Gadgetbridge or make your own app instead of using the stock one.
And yeah, I'm certainly not going to worry about it getting scratched or slightly wet. Actually, it got dropped and stepped on, and is slightly dented but still seems to run fine - the epoxy sealant for the electronics seems intact and while I was a bit concerned for the battery, that's been a while with no issues.
And, while I have no idea whether the app is quietly collecting data and pushing it to a server in china (if it is, it is doing it in a way that is sneaking past the firewall), at least it does not require creating an account to use.
So in that sense it is maybe more private than oura or samsung ?
The only way the concept of a smart ring makes sense to me is as a form of gestural navigation/usage for real world or virtual world inputs that would be similar in affect to media presentations of superpowers/magic.
Thus, with my smart ring I can walk towards my office and make the open gesture before getting to it and the door opens for me and I don't have to do the other stuff. I can make the open gesture but contact security also and it opens but contacts security.
I can make the close all the doors and lock the house gesture and only the smart ring open can open them etc.
Login open computer, I am using smart ring of course it does it.
Refuse to login open computer not using smart ring (obviously this has down sides, everything does)
Using smart ring but not you, give fake access computer in sandbox, contact security.
Obviously gestures would have to be customizable via your other smart world devices and computers and so forth. The benefits of an integrated platform.
Before anyone laughs at continual contact security. Smart ring is luxury and anyone who pays for that crap has enough money to pay for either personal security or at least an on call company, provided by smart ring services.
on edit: note this is my idea of what smart rings should do, don't know what the normal ones do, so my idea that it should be a luxury item may not track actual situation.
Also sounds like the author has done a great deal of work to improve himself, physically, and I can respect (and hat tip) to it, but he would definitely see the same issue with a wedding ring (except that you can usually resize those).
I wear my wedding ring constantly; even in the shower. I'm old-fashioned, and haven't really changed that much, since I got married (besides getting grayer and wrinklier).
The main problem is that a lot of the time series presented to the users of wearable products are lossy transforms of the original signals I want, so I have to use all the random projects on GitHub to try to access the raw data directly.
However my Oura Ring was also very battery-constrained so it also only looked at heart rate every few minutes. My Garmin measured it every second.
At first, I thought I could try to fix it myself. But I found that the repairability scores for the Oura Ring are atrocious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqCp-z9WAkA
Even looking at Pebble's new voice ring, it's designed to be thrown away when the battery runs out. I like the idea of smart rings, but they seem wasteful and products not really built to last.
For so many things, the absolute number being correct doesn’t matter, what’s more important is having _a_ scale that iou can use to chart against whatever you want. A “sleep score” doesn’t need to be accurate as long as it’s measuring the same thing (and that thing is the correct thing). Calorie counting is the same - it doesn’t matter if I think my breakfast is 500 calories but it’s actually 600 - as long as I consistently enter it incorrectly and measure my weight, I know I need to reduce my portion size somewhere.
Do you find you change your behavior at all based on the sleep tracking?
Not for me. I like wearing a normal watch, and I don't want to wear two watches.
I have always hated watches until I had a reasonably good one for a year, and lost it because ADHD just does not handle keeping track of things well.
But it seems to me people who refuse smart watches for normal watches probably are not doing so for crappy watches (and if you are for the rest of the post I shall assume you are the outlier). They must be reasonably luxurious brands that are preferred, as such there is a larger amount of the luxury market who might like smart rings (but this also seems off to me, who the hell wants to wear a crappy looking ring, in the luxury market.)
Maybe however the multiple watches look might catch on, like the stand-up routine of Harry Anderson the guy who used to play the judge on Night Court. He was a guy who could wear two or three watches on each hand, and maybe a couple on his ankles. That was style right there.
And what specifically do you mean by normal?
you posted yours 44 minutes ago.
Is it? I don't really like wearing watches and certainly have no interest in a smart watch. It's also deductible from my HSA whereas personal security (??????) isn't and also costs significantly more?
https://www.jckonline.com/magazine-article/the-knot-2019-jew...
Since people tend to stay married for years, and tungsten wasn't as popular previously, the actual number of adult men wearing tungsten wedding bands is probably a lot lower, maybe around 10%.
Still a lot. Approximately nobody wears them in Germany; seems like an opportunity.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-your-health-dat...
Are you pretending that you are unaware that this can happen, or are you showing contempt for people who gain or lose weight? I don't find either useful.
I'm not sure if proper Apple Health would help with this but Google tends to be delayed at automatic recognition of activities (e.g. I take a walk it can be an hour or two until it processes automatically). Apple would recognize a walk as I was on it.
I had a FitBit Charge 4 some years ago, but it stopped working after a couple years.
Then I got a RingConn 2 last year, but like TFA I've decided that I don't like the ring form factor.
So you don’t actually need the ring? :)
This is actually a serious question: I would want to use a smart ring for the things I can’t tell by myself. But then I also can’t judge the accuracy and consistency of the corresponding measures.
same thing applies to the ring!
I also find the cost of the Oura outrageous. But getting the $450 smart ring instead of the $20 smart ring from aliexpress is the buyer's choice. It doubles as jewelry, and some people are willing to spend on that. And the software quality is certainly better than with the bargain bin option
I’d wager the future lifetime spending of someone who owns a $4000 watch on other watches is at least one and maybe two orders of magnitude greater than the general population.
Once upon a time I thought this kind of thing would be needed for accurate hand tracking for VR applications, in lieu of a full glove, but it seems to not be a major use case.
It also needs to be charged daily which is inconvenient, whereas a normal watch lasts for years, and the smart ring lasts several days.
The smart phone integration features don't really work well either. It'll buzz with a notification, I'll look down and there's nothing. 2-3 seconds later the notification appears, but it'll only say who it's from, not the contents, despite my privacy settings being set correctly. I tap it, and a second later the message appears. I may as well have pulled out my phone instead.
By normal, these are the criteria I've decided I want in a watch, after trying out a handful from aliexpress:
- Quartz mechanism - day-date - Arabic numerals - light face - some sort of illumination
There are some rare exceptions for specific jobs, see OSHA (or your country equivalent) for the exact rules that apply to you.
There are composites which are fiber based but those aren't labelled as steel toes, they aren't designed to shatter and it's not plastic.
But if you're an actual worker that relies on them to save your toes, CT has much worse puncture resistance than ST. So it's trivial to puncture with a framing nail gun or cut through it if you rest a board on your toe, for example.
They also shatter when something heavy falls on them. If the thing bounces and you're quick enough to pull your foot, then great. If not, the second bounce will be shattering your toes and your boot will be filled with fleshy composite soup that is impossible to save. A steel toe in that situation will just bend and odds are good that your foot will be salvageable.
If you make program with a bunch of different exercises, and are modifying your program a lot, it can be a pain to keep track of what your next exercise should be.
If you are automatically tracking reps, it can just announce whatever the next thing in your program is, and start rest timers automatically...
It's not really about tracking reps as much as tracking where you are in a program that it is useful for...
It never occurred to me that I'd want to automatically track reps. I mean, it could be kinda useful, but I'm also taking 45 to 60 seconds cool-down between exercises anyway, so it's not like it gets in the way.
That also moves the app onto the next exercise in the programme. It's manual, but it's not intrusive and can't be wrong, like a fitness tracker, that definitely can be. So shrug, just personally, auto-tracking reps isn't something I need and wouldn't be a big selling point for a band/watch over a ring.