Good rings took the tech world by storm final yr, however they’re nonetheless comparatively area of interest by way of world gross sales. Samsung apart, most good ring manufacturers are fledgling startups, all making an attempt to make a reputation for themselves in a Wild West business. There is no template for the “proper” method to make good rings.
So it is no shock that we noticed a variety of good ring options at CES 2025, displaying manufacturers like Ultrahuman, Round, and Evie throwing their darts on the board and seeing what is going to follow shoppers.
We interviewed a number of good ring CEOs round CES, together with Oura’s Tom Hale, and bought some helpful insights into how they hope to rebrand good rings, whether or not it’s medical monitoring, AI insights, or luxurious jewellery. And it will be fascinating to see which angle pays off.
Proactive AI insights into bodily developments
Good rings gather a ton of data in your sleep high quality and coronary heart charge, with generic explanations for why you may get a nasty rating. Movano Well being, which sells the petite Evie good ring for girls, is trying to make use of “EvieAI” to enhance the actionable insights you get out of your information.
Introduced at CES 2025, the EvieAI Digital Wellness Assistant “generates clear and concise solutions primarily based on articles which have been revealed in over 100,000 medical journals…to interpret advanced person queries about virtually any symptom, illness, situation, or process.”
CEO John Mastrototaro, whom we interviewed concerning the announcement, defined that as a result of the AI can “solely reply with what it is aware of” from “validated medical info,” cross-references with sources like Mayo Clinic for the perfect solutions — whereas ignoring any non-medical questions.
He additionally promised that your questions will stay non-public, with no info despatched again to Movano Well being to be offered to advertisers.
Whereas this preliminary model of EvieAI is a extra generic sort of chatbot search engine for medical information, the corporate guarantees that future EvieAI responses might be “customized primarily based on customers’ personal well being metrics, together with coronary heart charge, blood oxygen, menstrual cycle info, pores and skin temperature variability, sleep, train, and temper.”
That is one thing that the Oura Ring 4 can already do to some extent with its AI chatbot, and it is that model of EvieAI that sounds probably the most promising for the way forward for good rings, the place an AI is ” all that information, and if it sees one thing altering in your developments…it may deliver that to your consideration,” defined Mastrototaro.
Lots of the finest good rings name consideration to detrimental developments, however a medically-focused AI chatbot may, in idea, present extra customized and specialised insights into that information than what’s at the moment obtainable. Whether or not EvieAI can ship “99.9% correct” information on the energy of its sources, as Mastrototaro suggests, might be value investigating.
Transitioning from ‘wellness’ to ‘well being’ monitoring
One of many largest CES good ring bulletins was the Round Ring 2. Whereas the unique Round Ring was skinny and flat-edged with a comparatively quick battery life, the Ring 2 has a extra conventional rounded ring form, an 8-day battery life, and an “FDA-approved” ECG sensor to actively detect potential AFib, tachycardia, and brachycardia.
“All of those [smart ring] manufacturers compete for one thing very related, and it’s totally laborious for shoppers to distinguish after we’re all providing the identical factor,” defined Round CEO Amaury Kosman throughout a CES interview. Transitioning from conventional “wellness” options like sleep and stress to precise well being and medical info is how they plan to face out from the group and appeal to B2B gross sales.
Including the ECG meant abandoning Round’s trademark haptics for notifications and alarms, however Kosman sees medical accuracy because the precedence till they’ll match each in a single ring.
Round desires to show its good rings into an at-home various for “costly” and “invasive” medical checks on the physician’s workplace, providing you with actionable info so that you’re armed with data earlier than you go to the physician. ECGs are the beginning, Kosman says, with future options like “blood stress” and passive AFib detection being labored on.
Whereas many smartwatches have FDA-approved AFib detection, most cease there, solely promising a “wellness” check-in space like blood oxygen. Good rings, which may promise a extra actual match in your finger, appear to be pivoting to ship FDA approval in additional areas; working example, Movano Well being bought FDA approval for its pulse oximeter final December. Mastrototano, too, guarantees the Evie Ring might be a “clinical-grade gadget for B2B channels.”
In different phrases, even when shoppers solely see good rings as a distinct segment novelty for now, which may change if medical doctors advocate at-risk sufferers purchase good rings for correct monitoring instead of costlier and cumbersome gear. If medical corporations use their
Attracting the luxurious crowd
Ultrahuman took one more rebranding tack at CES when it introduced the Ultrahuman Uncommon. It is a £1,499 good ring made from both 18k gold or 95% platinum, whereas nonetheless providing the identical well being and health instruments because the Ultrahuman Ring Air.
“What units the Uncommon aside…is the advanced engineering that goes into making a strong but aesthetic kind issue out of gold, platinum, and rose gold,” Ultrahuman defined in its announcement.
Ultrahuman is not a skin-deep sort of firm; it introduced PowerPlugs final yr as a method to broaden what the Ring Air can observe, and in 2025 revealed its Blood Imaginative and prescient gambit to attach your ring wellness information together with your blood markers for extra actual info. So, its approach ahead is not simply about turning good rings into enticing jewellery.
Nonetheless, even when the Ultrahuman Uncommon has very restricted gross sales, we see aesthetics as an important path ahead for good rings, as all of them are usually so thick and much like each other. They stand out in comparison with the thin, rounded rings that most individuals put on, and that may restrict their attain with shoppers.
This exhibits that if good ring manufacturers transcend the tech area and make them appear enticing luxurious gadgets to mainstream shoppers, that could possibly be one more path for them to develop past their present area of interest. Jewelers and malls have much more promoting attain and clout than little-known tech manufacturers.
