What Does a Smart Ring Do? Uses for Health, Wellness, Longevity

• The smart ring market is exploding, with options available at Costco and Walmart.
• Rings aren’t perfect health monitoring tools, but they can help detect patterns and some illnesses.
• Healthcare companies and the US military are increasingly interested in harnessing the tech.

The rich and famous have been wearing them for years, and competing for the very best sleep scores. Longevity doctors swear by them too. But 2025 may just be the year that smart rings become the “it” tracker for the masses.

“We call it a ‘check engine’ light for your body,” Oura CEO Tom Hale told Business Insider. “It’s a tool for you to become literate in the dynamics of your biometrics as they relate to your behaviors.”

Oura has been the longtime leader in smart rings — the Finnish company debuted its first ring in a Kickstarter campaign 10 years ago. The undeniable giant in the smart ring space (for now), Oura recently debuted a slimmer and smoother 4th generation ring model, priced from $349 to $399.

Oura says it has been profitable for 14 months after many years in the red. On Thursday, the company announced a $200 million series D funding round, bringing its valuation to $5.2 billion.

There’s also been an explosion of competitor rings, including the $349 Ultrahuman Ring Air, which debuted in 2022. In 2024, we’ve seen Samsung’s $399 Galaxy ring enter the market as well as smaller devices like the longevity-focused and David Sinclair-backed $200 Virtusan ring.

It all heralds the beginning of a new wearables category that may eventually help people eat, exercise, sleep, and avoid illness a little better than we do now.

“I welcome all the competition,” Oura’s Hale said. “It makes us better, it’s good for the market.”

Every smart ring has a different competitive claim

Each smart ring company seems to have its own differentiator, the thing that they say makes them better than the rest, whether it’s the thinnest ring band, the best battery life, or the biggest dataset.

They each generally track steps, monitor temperature, and log heart rate.

Dr. Daniel Kraft, a Bay Area-based physician-scientist and founder, says that’s probably enough for the general consumer. We don’t all need FDA-approved medical devices on our fingers. Instead, there’s value in the consistency of the data a ring provides, monitoring trends day after day, learning about our bodies.

“We’re all quite different and it’s often the change from baseline that is most important,” Kraft told BI.

Longitudinal trend lines can be useful for tracking things like how exercise, supplements, or stress are impacting a person’s overall health. In Kraft’s case, he watched his resting heart rate drop eight points over a roughly three-month period of daily exercise sessions.

“That gets people engaged, like, ‘Wow, I make these small incremental changes and I’m going to see changes that show up in weeks and months and years,'” he said.

Until now, interest in Oura rings has largely been driven by word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, colleagues, and some longevity-focused physicians. Oura’s friend referrals (a 10% discount) drive a lot of the business; almost half of Oura members were referred by a friend or family member, according to the company.

A smart ring is also “considered a little premium,” Jeffrey Kim, Samsung America’s senior product lead for the Galaxy smart ring, told BI.

2025 is shaping up to be the year that smart rings could go mainstream in a big way.

Multiple projections show the market for smart rings taking off, growing more than 20% year over year, until 2030. Over the past six months, Ultrahuman has started stocking its ring at major brick-and-mortar retailers in the US, including Best Buy, Verizon, Costco, and Walmart, and the company says more than 15,000 people in the US are picking up a new Ultrahuman ring each month.

Smart rings are about more than fitness tracking — they’re being used for period tracking and to predict illnesses

Already, studies have shown smart rings are good at picking up when someone is about to get sick with a viral illness like COVID or the flu, by combining metrics like heart rate variability with temperature and breathing rate while asleep.

Some brands have also been carving out a niche among women, playing up their potential impact on women’s health. In the US, women were not required to be included in medical research until 1993.

“We need more data,” Dr. Umbereen Nehal, a fem-tech founder and pediatrician, told BI. “I would like to have accurate, personalized care. I would like to prevent bad things happening to me.”

Women now make up the majority of Oura and Ultrahuman users (55% and 60%, respectively). Beyond sleep and fitness, a ring can use temperature to track a period — not a failsafe technique, but it’s a non-invasive option to help people better plan when to have sex to conceive or avoid a pregnancy.

Nehal hasn’t bought into the ring hype yet. In part, she says it’s because the current rings are too “ugly” for her. But she also cautions consumers to maintain a “healthy skepticism” toward their wearables, and not take the data insights or recommendations as health gospel.

“Try to understand: who was this tested on? Who was this built for? How do you want to use it? Do you think this is a good way for what you want to know?” she said. “Recognize that when you buy a product, you are still in the driver’s seat of deciding what to do with that information.”

Having more at-home data on everyday health may prove useful, but it doesn’t have to come from our fingers or wrists. Kraft said we can also harness health insights from cameras, voice recorders, and other easily accessible tech.

Ultrahuman founder and CEO Mohit Kumar imagines that his customers will use the Ring Air as an entry point into what can be a whole body and house health monitoring system, complete with a CGM for tracking blood sugar and a CO2 scrubber for cleaning the air.

Oura has recently partnered with CGM-maker Dexcom and inked a $96 million deal with the Department of Defense. Some US Army airmen have been trying out Oura rings in an attempt to optimize performance by helping make decisions about when they might need more rest, or a caffeine boost.

Medicare Advantage plan Essence Healthcare says it will start offering free Oura rings to seniors in 2025, in the hopes of reducing healthcare costs.

“If I see Mrs. Jones’s resting heart rate went from 65 to 95 over the last month, and it’s not just because she’s been climbing stairs, it’s when she’s sleeping, boy, I might want to call and figure out what’s going on cardiopulmonary-wise,” Kraft said. “A lot of our healthcare issues, they show up in subtle ways weeks, months, or years early, and they’re just not picked up on, they can’t be picked on that short clinical visit — if you’re lucky enough to have primary care doctor at all.”

Smart ring vs smartwatch

Smart ring pros

• Small, inconspicuous, and unobtrusive
• Great for sleep tracking
• Long-lasting battery (~1 week)

Smart ring cons

• Not as ideal for sports like weightlifting or running; you can’t track your pace, and it gets in the way when you’re lifting weights
• Can’t pick up a phone call or respond to a text
• Expensive