Latest news with #UltrahumanRingAir
CNET
16-05-2025
- Health
- CNET
This Subscription-Free Fitness Tracking Ring Is Up to $65 Off Right Now
These days, you don't need a bulky smartwatch to keep an eye on your fitness throughout the day. Smart rings are a sleeker, less clunky solution -- especially if you're wearing them at night. The Ultrahuman Ring Air is one of CNET's picks for top smart rings, and it can perform many of the same functions as a wrist-worn fitness tracker without throwing off your style. It typically sells for $350, but right now you can pick up any of the five color variants for as little as $285 when you shop at QVC. That's thanks to a $50 direct discount and coupon code HELLO15 that takes an extra $15 if you're new to QVC. It's not quite the biggest discount we've seen, but deals on this smart ring are far and few between, so you could be waiting a while if you're holding out for a better offer. The device is water-resistant and weighs in at just 2.4 grams, hence the "Air" in the name. It can track sleep data, functions as a fitness tracker, has a heart rate monitor, supports circadian phase alignment and more. What makes it more appealing is that it is subscription-free, compared to other smart rings like the Oura Ring (which costs $6+ a month if you want all of your insights). Hey, did you know? CNET Deals texts are free, easy and save you money. If you're trying to get a detailed look at your health and fitness data, the Ultrahuman Ring Air is an ideal choice. It lets you track your sleep, movement, recovery and other health data through the Ultrahuman app, which calculates everything using its own scores. The ring can even tell you the optimal times to drink caffeine based on your personal data. It's even perfectly suited for high-performance athletes who need to maintain their overall health. It also offers additional features, including food tracking and time management to help you avoid glucose spikes or disrupted sleep. Why this deal matters The Ultrahuman Ring is a great fitness tracker that hasn't been on sale much, so a potential $65 discount is worth paying attention to. Fitness rings are still a fairly new category, so discounts on them still very rare. If you like the look of this one, make sure you get in on it sooner rather than later as we don't know when the deal is set to expire.
Tom's Guide
07-05-2025
- Health
- Tom's Guide
Oura's latest update brings AI-powered meal tracking to the table — and I'm worried this could go very wrong
Oura just announced new AI-powered features to 'fuel your body for energy, performance and long-term health.' The two latest upgrades center around metabolic health and meal tracking, but right now, they're only available for US users. Oura says it's a 'major milestone' toward becoming a 'fully integrated health solution.' To date, Oura has undoubtedly been an industry-defining market leader and arguably remains the best smart ring you can buy. However, with stiff competition from the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Ring and Ultrahuman Ring Air, the smart ring market is becoming increasingly competitive. I'm concerned Oura might be doing too much with its latest branch out into metabolic health. You may like Could Oura become the jack of all trades, master of none? Here's what we know so far. (Image credit: Future) The two metabolic-focused AI-enabled tools are Meals and Glucose, and will roll out shortly to Oura Ring 3 and Oura Ring 4 users based in the US who use the app in English. Oura announced the Oura Labs feature in 2024, allowing members to test experimental features and provide feedback. If they're considered a hit with the audience, features can be rolled out into the app. Here's what made the cut. 1. Meals The latest Labs success is Meals, which, according to Oura, provides key insights into nutrition and meal timing using AI-powered feedback from Oura Advisor. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. Simply snap a photo of your meal and Oura can help provide 'informed dietary decisions' about your food, including macronutrients — proteins, fats and carbs — and its quality, plus suggestions for long-term improvement. Yep, you read that correctly. Using images alone, Oura can tell you how nutritious your food is, right down to the fiber content. 2. Glucose tracking Paired with the Stelo Glucose Biosensor by Dexcom, a brand new in-app glucose monitoring feature means you can measure glucose levels day and night, with the app providing feedback directly while drawing from existing analysis like your sleep, stress and activity levels. Essentially, it's another way for Oura to provide a holistic view on the quality of your everyday health, alongside tools such as heart health, women's health and fitness, to assess long-term trends. If you want to know more about how to manage your metabolic health, now you can. What do we know? Your metabolic health can be impacted by the foods you eat, how your body processes them, lifestyle factors and genetics. That's why the rollout looks at data pulled from the existing features you use daily alongside your meals to inform the analysis. Shyamal Patel, PhD., and SVP of Science at Oura, describes their approach as 'unique.' Published through Oura's website, she explained: 'Meal-induced glucose spikes can vary significantly due to factors like sleep, stress, exercise and meal timing, which is why it's important to approach metabolic health holistically rather than focusing exclusively on diet.' The goal is to look for patterns and use experimentation to discover what works and what doesn't, hopefully helping to maintain improved balance over time based on your daily habits. Rather than avoiding specific foods, the aim is to encourage a healthy relationship that lasts, looking at what could be impacting your glucose from various angles, rather than focusing on the one spike you had, say, after eating chocolate on a Friday afternoon. Verdict I've been lucky enough to own both generations of the Oura Ring and have used the app for years. I'm worried Oura could be diluting their product by introducing too many new ingredients. For the average person, monitoring your glucose levels daily isn't really necessary. I wore a CGM monitor as a test for Tom's Guide, and I actually found it more stressful than informative, getting lost in the minefield that is your blood sugar. In fact, I could be found staring down every spike in my blood sugar with the scrutiny of VAR checking a dodgy penalty decision. (Image credit: Future owns: Sam Hopes) Your pancreas is designed to take care of blood sugar for you, releasing insulin (a hormone) to regulate blood glucose by moving it out of your bloodstream and into your cells. While a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) is a useful (and sometimes crucial) tool for people managing chronic health conditions such as diabetes and insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes), not everyone needs to monitor their own glucose. I fear Oura is starting to steer away from what they're best at — tracking your sleep and stress hygiene — in a bid to keep on top of the competition with their innovation. Am I worried it'll encourage people to over-worry about another aspect of their health? Possibly. Do I need yet another app scrutinizing what I eat? No. And although Oura reassures members that the feature aims to keep things balanced, I fear people who don't already have a healthy relationship with their food could struggle. But to keep evolving in an ever-growing smart ring market, perhaps it's Oura's time to dare to diversify. And given the features that were all-clear from Oura Labs, it looks like people want it. For me, the jury is out. More from Tom's Guide
NBC News
24-04-2025
- Health
- NBC News
I tested the Ultrahuman Ring Air for months — here's how it compares to the Oura Ring.
What do you want from your wearable tech? That's the question I kept asking myself while wearing the Ultrahuman Ring Air. Do you want reminders to stretch or go to bed? Do you want a schedule to optimize every minute of exercise in your week? Or do you just want to check your health stats every now and then? The Ultrahuman Ring Air has a very specific answer, one that's different from the competition. I wore it daily for two months: here's everything you need to know. What is the Ultrahuman Ring Air? Ultrahuman Ring Air The Ultrahuman Ring Air ($349) is a smart ring that tracks health, wellness and fitness metrics like heart rate , skin temperature, activity, workouts, stress and more. It automatically detects naps, sleep and some exercise like outdoor walks. You can also manually start and stop workouts or breathing exercises through the app, with dozens of profiles available. (You can also log food and water intake, but I didn't test this feature.) You view all of your data and insights through the Ultrahuman app, which is full of charts, graphs and scores for things like your sleep, dynamic recovery, movement index, stress rhythm and circadian rhythm. The ring does not have a monthly subscription. There are extra features for a monthly fee, but they feel like just that: extra, not key to the core experience. Weight: 2.4 — 3.6 grams | Thickness: 2.45 — 2.8 mm | Sizes available: 5-14 | Battery life: up to 6 days | Built-in GPS: no | Sleep tracking: yes (including naps) | Heart-rate monitor: yes, with EKG | Water resistance: yes, up to 100 meters (up to 12 hours) | Works best with: Ultrahuman app (iOS or Android) How I tried Ultrahuman Ring Air I tested the Ultrahuman Ring Air for two months after the brand sent me a ring sizing kit and ring sample for review. I wore the ring (seen above in the raw titanium color) on my right ring finger, only taking it off to charge. I wore it at the same time as the Oura Ring 4 ($349) and Apple Watch Series 10 ($399). I compared comfort, battery life, accuracy and usability between the three wearables. My experience with the Ultrahuman Ring Air The Ultrahuman Ring Air takes an active approach to health tracking. It tries to give you actionable information throughout your day. You'll receive notifications for things like stretch reminders, the ideal time to drink caffeine or best time to get out and exercise for your circadian rhythm. It's hands-on, and an intriguing option for people who want to adjust their habits and get in the weeds with their data. What I like Slim and comfortable The Ultrahuman Ring Air lives up to its name: it's lightweight and comfortable, especially compared to other smart rings I've tried. On average, it's a little over 25% lighter than the Oura Ring 4 and a touch thinner too. That may not sound like a lot, but for a person who doesn't find rings all that comfortable, it feels substantially more comfortable while sitting on my finger throughout the day. Actionable suggestions and data insights As advanced as smart rings are a common complaint I've heard people mention is that smart rings don't do anything. I feel like someone at Ultrahuman took this critique to heart — the app feels designed to move you into action: to drink coffee earlier, to exercise at specific times of day or to be diligent with bedtime. Like its competitors, the Ultrahuman Ring tracks, analyzes and scores your steps, sleep, stress and recovery. Where things get interesting is in what the brand calls PowerPlugs. PowerPlugs are widgets focused on giving you actionable information and notifications. The ones I tested most were caffeine window, circadian rhythm and sun exposure, though the app also has PowerPlugs for cycle tracking, screentime, social jetlag and more (including some PowerPlugs that require a subscription, like cardio adaptability). Each PowerPlug sent me notifications throughout the day. Caffeine window sent notifications in the morning, saying now is the time for caffeine, and in the afternoon, saying now is the last time you should drink caffeine. Circadian rhythm sent notifications (and used my iPhone's Live Tracking feature) to show my circadian phases — mostly my phase advance window, when 'bright light exposure and exercise is highly beneficial.' These active notifications encouraged me to change my habits in real time — many wearables keep this kind of advice quiet until you decide to open the app. In practice, this means that the Ultrahuman app sends you a lot of notifications — I've had days where it sends me nearly a dozen. Thankfully, you can customize the quantity of notifications in the settings menu. Consistent health and wellness tracking The Ultrahuman Ring provided similar data to my Oura Ring 4, neither wildly out of step with heart rate, movement, exercise and sleep data. Looking at sleep stages, Ultrahuman logged my frequent tossing and turning at night as being awake more often than the Oura Ring 4 did. The Oura Ring 4 also logged more deep sleep on average than the Ultrahuman ring did. Ultrahuman gave me lower sleep scores on average than Oura did. Fitness tracking was a similar story, though the Ultrahuman Ring gave me less errors on outdoor runs — Oura would occasionally record correct stats but very incorrect GPS data. One nice feature with Ultrahuman is that the app will keep a record of workouts detected, but never approved. That means if you forget to open the app for a few days, you can scroll through past days and accept or reject detected exercises, even days after the fact. The Oura ring doesn't have this: if you forget to open the app for a few days, you can only confirm detected workouts from a day, not days, prior. Potential drawbacks to keep in mind Battery life and charging could be better Battery life is only okay on the Ultrahuman Ring Air, likely due to its lightweight and slim design. It gets up to six days of battery life, but my experience was more like four to five. Competitors like the Samsung Galaxy Ring ($399) and Oura Ring 4 get up to seven and eight days respectively. But the real issue is charging — it's slow. Like, painfully slow. The Ultrahuman Ring Air takes about 180 minutes to fully charge from 0%. That's slower than the Oura Ring 4 (up to 80 minutes), Samsung Galaxy Ring (up to 90 minutes), RingConn Gen 2 Air (up to 120 minutes), Apple Watch Series 10 (up to 90 minutes), the list goes on. The app uses technical language often The Ultrahuman Ring app constantly uses language I was unfamiliar with. For PowerPlugs like caffeine window and circadian rhythm, get comfortable with phrases like phase advance, phase decay and phase delay, plus terms like minima zone and sympathetic activation. The app does a decent job explaining these concepts if you dive a little deeper, but at a glance, it can be confusing. It doesn't help that the app can lean into that terminology, like an overly-eager friend trying to impress. I got a daily notification that read 'Incoming Body to decode' — this could easily read 'your daily insights are here' instead. I understand that it's important for Ultrahuman to feel distinct from the competition. But using big words when small words would suffice is not how I would choose to stand out. The app can feel clunky to navigate Aside from technical language, the app just feels a bit clunky and scattered. The main navigation tabs at the bottom of the app are Ring, Metabolism, Zones, Discover and Profile. 95% of your insights and metrics are in the Ring section, the others, especially Metabolism and Zones, feel so outside the core ring functionality that I wish ring-centric metrics like sleep or dynamic recovery could take their place on the home page instead. The Ring tab itself is a bit busy because each metric is displayed in such a disparate way. The movement summary looks like a speedometer, caffeine window is a line graph, dynamic recovery is a bar graph — but when you click in for more details, all of them show simple bar graphs with suddenly unified design language. And if I haven't opened the app all day, it takes a while to sync, and often won't let me do anything until the ring finishes syncs. This can take anywhere from eight seconds to 20, slower than competitors like Oura, in my experience. Who is the Ultrahuman Ring Air for? If all this talk of PowerPlugs, phase advance windows and design language has you checked-out, then the Ultrahuman Ring Air probably isn't for you. For accurate health tracking that's holistic and approachable, the latest Oura Ring 4 is excellent. If you are all-in on Samsung devices, the Samsung Galaxy Ring is easy to use and seamless. But if you want something more active and technical, the Ultrahuman Ring Air might be the best smart ring for you. It's a fascinating wearable for a specific kind of person. It's for tinkerers, health nerds and optimizers. It's for anyone who wants their wearable to tell them what to do in the moment, rather than sit back and make suggestions when you open the app at the end of the day. It's for people who are curious about health and science-y terms, not intimidated. And it's for people who cannot stand the idea of paying for yet another monthly subscription service. Why trust NBC Select? I am a reporter at NBC Select who covers technology and fitness including recent stories on smartwatches, running shoes, workout earbuds and more. For this piece, I wore the Ultrahuman Ring Air daily for over two months after the brand sent me one to try. I tracked my daily stats, sleep and exercise and compared the fit and feel of the Ultrahuman Ring Air to other wearables on the market.
