Ultrahuman Ring AIR review: A ringing endorsement

Jul 16, 2023

There's a new smart ring is in town, but can its wellness tracking performance match up to market leader Oura?

The Ultrahuman Ring AIR is a smart ring that's a fitness and general wellbeing tracker all in one, just like the Oura Ring. It also promises to help you make the right choices in your day based on data like heart rate, sleep and how much time you spend on the move.

Like the Oura's smart ring, it packs in similar optical sensors to deliver those insights and stores them inside of a companion phone app that Ultrahuman has told me AIR owners will have lifetime access to.

At $349, it’s still not a cheap piece of connected jewellery to wear, but there could finally be another smart ring that’s fit to be on your finger. I've been wearing it for a few weeks to gather data and seeh how it fares, here's my full review.

The Ultrahuman Ring AIR emerges as genuine competition for the Oura Ring, offering a light and comfortable design, insightful tracking and a free companion app that makes taking on board guidance and advice an easy thing to do.

Ultrahuman makes the pretty bold claim that the Ring AIR is the 'world's most comfortable wearable' with a design that's sleek and discreet enough to wear and forget about. I'd definitely say it's comfortable to wear day and night, while it goes about its monitoring business.

Looks-wise, it currently comes in a single matte black look, though Ultrahuman tells me that new looks are coming, including a mirror-finish silver version. Right now, it's quite an ordinary design that doesn't look all that dissimilar to the dummy versions provided in the sizing kit. Sat side-by-side with an Oura and it's the Oura that looks the more elegant of the two smart rings.

It's made from titanium just like Oura's ring, with a hypoallergenic resin on the inside and a tungsten carbide coating to protect it from wear and tear. It does pick up scratches and wearing it for activities like lifting weights are scenarios when you're going to need to take it off.

It weighs anywhere from 2.4-3.6g (based on size), so it's a pleasingly light ring and as mentioned you'll need a sizing kit to make sure you get the best fit - this is important to make sure the built-in sensors can reliably track biometric data. While the fit has mostly been fine for me, there have been a couple of occasions in early testing where the ring has moved around and felt like it was going to slip off. That could be down to incorrect sizing, though strangely it seemed less of an issue in later testing.

It's good to see that Ultrahuman offers a good level of protection against moisture and water. It's safe to be submerged in water up to 100 metres deep and it's survived when joining me in the shower, bath and going for a swim. It's also held up in some rainy outdoor time as well, so there are no concerns there.

Packed inside of the AIR are optical sensors that can track skin temperature, movement, sleep, and heart rate-based metrics like resting heart rate and HRV. With that information, Ultrahuman wants to help better fuel decisions you make about your day. That could be choosing the right time or day to exercise or choosing to rest up because your recovery from a stressful day hasn't been optimal. It's very similar to the Readiness scores that Garmin and Oura adopt, with some additional things that aim to make the AIR experience feel different.

Those insights are all delivered through the Ultrahuman companion smartphone app, which is currently free to use so doesn't incur an additional charge on top of buying the ring outright.

The presentation of that app (I used the iOS version), definitely has a very Oura feel about it. It's nicely stylised and it doesn't feel overly busy, giving prominence to the information that will help make best sense of the data the ring is capturing.

There's some additional extras too, like workouts, meditations and sleep stories alongside advice on metabolic fitness for those who choose to pick up Ultrahuman’s M1 continuous glucose sensor too.

You'll need to spend a couple of weeks creating a baseline for that data, to help the ring and the onboard sensors to generate the most reliable results. Once you're through that baseline period, that is when you should start to take on board what the ring is telling you. Even during the period, I found the data in general to be pretty good on the whole.

Take heart rate data, where it captures real-time heart rate readings, resting heart rate readings and heart rate variability measurements, which helps to power recovery insights. I actually found the general heart rate measurements to be more in line with the reliable continuous heart rate readings from a Garmin watch and a heart rate monitor, compared to the Oura. Skin temperature readings didn't seem wildly out either, which can be the case with some watches that promise similar tracking.

When it's time to sleep, there's a lot that Ultrahuman grabs here. It looks at sleep efficiency, temperature, total sleep, consistency, timing and HR drop. It breaks down sleep stages and is also capturing blood oxygen saturation averages, which is currently in beta testing.

On most nights, I found the core sleep tracking held up well against the Oura, in terms of capturing similar sleep duration and offering similar breakdown of sleep stages. There have been a few nights where sleep duration data has been oddly broken up, suggesting I'd only slept a few hours or may have reset sleep tracking because I'd woken up or been stirred during the night.

In addition to the sleep tracking Ultrahuman also offers a Circadian Phase Alignment mode, which basically looks at your exposure to bright light, eating food at certain times or performing physical exercise in particular parts of the day that can impact on your circadian rhythm, which in turn can influence your sleep times and wake-up times. The app will send prompts to start reducing your exposure to bright light or dissuading you to exercise when it might impact on sleep. It sounds complex, but it's actually well presented and easy to grasp if you want to pay attention to it.

There's also a recently added Stimulants Permissible Window, which basically aims to tell you the recommended time to consume stimulants like coffee to enhance mental clarity, elevate mood and boost productivity. It's another nicely presented feature that's glanceable to tell you when it's time to say no to a coffee.

In terms of monitoring your activity, the AIR uses the built-in accelerometer sensors to track steps, how many hours you've been active during the day and capturing your workout frequency as well. I found step counts nicely in line with the Oura and Garmin's step tracking, and were generally within 200-300 steps of those trackers on most days.

Like Oura, it's adding a workout tracking mode that requires using your phone's GPS and the app to better factor in your exercise time. It already offers pretty rich third-party app integration to pull in that data from other places including Garmin, Our, Zwift, Polar and MyFitnessPal, if you find the idea of tracking activities from your phone a chore.

More features are coming, like the ability to measure cardiovascular fitness through VO2 Max estimates, measuring arterial stiffness to take it more into a health monitoring direction and will start tracking respiratory rate as well.

I've been wearing the AIR alongside the Oura Ring Gen 3 and Garmin Forerunner 965 to compare the readiness scores those devices offer and on most days, they've been telling me similar things, which is obviously a good sign. Like those devices, it's about offering guidance and not definitive advice and from that perspective, the AIR has proved useful on the whole.

The AIR packs in a 24mAh capacity battery that unsurprisingly isn't removable, and continuing that Oura-mimicking trend uses a small charging dock that you can toss your ring onto when it needs charging.

Ultrahuman says it can last up to six days on a single charge, but based on my testing that feels massively generous. It lasted 3 days on a full charge on average, which actually matched the battery performance of the Oura Ring Gen 3 I wore on my other hand.

There's some advice on offer in the app to ensure you get the best battery performance from it, but I never got anywhere near to six days in my time testing it.

It's not exactly a rapid charger either when it does hit 0 per cent, but it will send nudging phone notifications to tell you when the battery is low and you need to drop it on the very conveniently designed cradle.

The Ultrahuman Ring AIR succeeds in being a smart ring that you can wear day and night, while packing in an array of sensors that can match the level of metrics on offer from its obvious clear rival.

There are more than a few passing resemblances to Oura's Ring here, particularly with the app, though the lack of a subscription cost attached to it gives the AIR extra appeal.

More features are coming too to improve its usefulness, along with some nice software features that offer some extras over Oura.

I'd definitely think it needs a more attractive form factor to go with those useful insights, but if you can live with that plain matte black look and like the idea of a cheaper alternative to the Oura Ring Gen 3, then this does feel like a ring that can rival the current best in the smart ring business on most fronts.

An experienced journalist and former editor of wearable tech website Wareable, Michael has been writing about, testing and using fitness and running kit for many years. He's also one of the founding members of The Run Testers, a popular YouTube channel that specialises in running gear and putting it through its paces. He's a keen runner and an encyclopedia of knowledge when it comes to the latest developments in the world of shoes, apparel, smart devices and much more.