The $349 Ultrahuman Ring Air tracks the widest variety of health metrics of any smart ring we’ve tested. The sleek and stylish finger-based fitness tracker monitors common stats such as activity, sleep, and stress. Beyond the basics, it offers optional add-ons to track less common wellness criteria like circadian rhythm alignment, optimal caffeine windows, and screen time, in addition to women’s health metrics like menstrual cycle and ovulation. Some of these add-ons come at a premium, but most are free. The $349 Oura Ring 4 requires a monthly subscription, but justifies the additional cost with better battery life and more accurate and detailed exercise tracking, so it remains our Editors’ Choice for smart rings.
Design: Lightweight and Stylish
The Ultrahuman Ring Air does a lot with only a few physical sensors. The petite circular design contains an infrared photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor, a medical-grade skin temperature sensor, a six-axis motion sensor, red LEDs for heart rate and oxygen saturation sensing, and green LEDs for additional heart rate measurements. These sensors combine to measure heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, movement, sleep, stress, and more.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
The ring is made of jet-grade titanium and coated in tungsten carbide. It’s water-resistant to a depth of 330 feet. The Ring Air is available in Aster Black, Bionic Gold, Matte Grey, Raw Titanium, or Space Silver, each for $349 in sizes 5 through 14. You can get a free sizing kit sent to you first from the company site. The Oura Ring 4 comes in a wider range of sizes (4 through 15), as does the $399.99 Samsung Galaxy Ring (5 through 15).
Ultrahuman recently announced a trio of luxury finishes for the Ring Air called the Desert Collection. The Desert Collection consists of Desert Rose, Desert Snow, or Dune, with the Dune and Desert Rose models crafted from 18k gold and the Desert Snow model made of pt950 platinum. Ultrahuman hasn’t announced pricing for these upcoming luxury variants, but it’s nice to have options. Aside from the finish, the Desert Collection should have the same sensors and capabilities as the base Ring Air.
Depending on the size, the Ultrahuman Ring Air weighs anywhere from 0.08 to 0.13 ounces, which roughly matches the Samsung Galaxy Ring (0.08 to 0.11 ounces) and undercuts the Oura 4 (0.12 to 0.18 ounces). The band is 0.32 inches wide and between 0.10 and 0.11 inches in depth, roughly matching both the Galaxy Ring (0.28 by 0.10 inches) and the Oura 4 (0.30 by 0.10 inches).
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
The interior of the ring has one flattened section holding the sensors, which felt smooth and comfortable on my finger. The Oura Ring 4’s interior sensors protrude a bit more, but they’re still quite small and barely noticeable. The Galaxy Ring has bigger sensor bumps than both, but they still didn’t cause me discomfort in testing. Even so, I enjoyed the remarkably smooth feel of the Ultrahuman Ring Air, and it never bothered me when making a fist or lifting weights.
Setup: Quick and Easy
I tested a size 13 Ring Air in the Space Silver finish. Aside from the ring, the simple packaging includes a charging stand and a USB-C cable, but no charging brick. To start the setup process, you need to place the ring on the charging stand and plug it in. Wait for the light on the stand to turn purple, then place the ring on it. The flat portion of the ring’s interior lines up with the flat side on the charging stand, so the ring only fits on it when properly aligned.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Once the ring is in place, the light on the charging stand switches from purple to white and blinks twice. Ultrahuman then recommends letting the Ring Air charge for 30 minutes before syncing with the app and completing setup.
In the meantime, you can download the Ultrahuman app (available for Android and iOS). When you open the app, it prompts you to allow notifications, Bluetooth access, and location services, then asks you to create or sign into an account.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Once your account is set and the ring is sufficiently charged, the app will prompt you to pair and set up your ring. Pairing happens quickly, then the app asks for some personal information needed to calculate your health metrics, including your weight, height, gender (with male, female, and other as the given options), and activity level (low, medium, or high).
Once the ring is connected, the Ultrahuman app walks you through its various sections and key metrics. As usual for a fitness wearable, after the setup and tutorial, you’ll then need to wear the device for at least a day for it to gather data and populate the app with useful information. More data becomes available the longer and more consistently you wear the ring.
Battery Life: Up to 5 Days in Testing
Comfort and battery life are two reasons to choose a smart ring for holistic health monitoring over a smartwatch or a wrist-based fitness tracker. The Ultrahuman Ring Air’s 24mAh lithium polymer (LiPo) battery promises up to six days of battery on a charge, well beyond the capabilities of flagship smartwatches like the Apple Watch Series 10 (36 hours), the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 (22 hours), or the Google Pixel Watch 3 (46.5 hours).
In my testing, the ring’s stated battery life spec proved to be a slight overestimate, but it consistently lasted just over five days between trips to the charger in the real world. The app notifies you when the battery drops to 30% and then again at 20% but doesn’t provide further warnings. After that second warning, I found that the ring lost its remaining charge within a few hours.
For comparison, the Oura Ring 4 lasted just over seven days on a charge in our battery test, and the Samsung Galaxy Ring lasted for six. The Ultrahuman Ring Air, therefore, comes in last of the trio, but five days is still a good result and enough time to capture plenty of holistic data between charges.
After placing it on the charger, the Ultrahuman Ring Air recharged from zero to full in 125 minutes. The light on the charging stand turns green when it’s full, but the app doesn’t send a notification to let you know to come get your charged ring.
App: Detailed and Customizable
All of your health data populates in the app’s main Ring tab. On the bottom of the screen is a navigation panel with additional tabs labeled Discover, Metabolism, Profile, and Zones. Discover offers workout and meditation programs, Metabolism requires different devices like a glucose sensor to get information, Profile shows you your account and data settings (and offers another place to access your health reports besides the main Ring tab), and Zones organizes your movement data into simple and sharable goals.
The main Ring tab organizes your data into categories and presents each in its own card. At the top of the screen, you can tap Today for a drop-down calendar to jump to a specific day, or you can scroll to view past days’ data.
On the current day, the information updates dynamically based on your movement or stress levels, with different cards surfacing at different times of the day. The top card for me was typically movement, which shows an activity score out of 100, as well as your number of steps taken and kCals burned through movement. Tapping the card shows more details with your movement score (called Movement Index) graphed over time and total tallies of active minutes and hours.
The stress card usually shows up next in the app for me. It shows a score called Stress Rhythm, which correlates stress levels with Circadian Rhythm to assess how well you’re handling stress at any given time. Tapping the card breaks down the amount of time you spend in states such as stressed, stimulated, or relaxed and graphs this information over time. You can manually add events to the stress timeline to add details.
(Credit: Ultrahuman/PCMag)
Other cards include sleep, sleep debt, manual recovery from stress, HRV, resting HR, and more. You can expand your available cards with a unique feature called PowerPlugs. This is where you can customize and fine-tune the app to display the information that you care about.
PowerPlugs essentially expands the number of cards you see with additional information. I added two PowerPlugs, Caffeine Permissible Window and Circadian Phase Alignment.
Caffeine Permissible Window tracks my sleep patterns and recommends ideal times to drink caffeine for an energy boost and times to stop drinking caffeine to ensure a good night’s rest. I found it interesting that it recommends delaying caffeine consumption in the morning to flush out residual Adenosine (a naturally occurring compound in your body that contributes to metabolism).
Circadian Phase Alignment maps stimuli such as stress and exercise against circadian rhythm to recommend ideal times to go to bed and wake up. This PowerPlug also recommends ideal times to exercise and adds context to the stress card.
The Ultrahuman app offers a large variety of PowerPlugs. Screentime tracks the time on your phone as it relates to sleep. Vitamin D makes suggestions for when to get sun exposure. Social Jetlag tracks your body clock against your social schedule. The app has other options like AFib Detection, Cardio Adaptability, Cycle and Ovulation, and Pregnancy Insights. Some plugs like AFib Detection and Cardio Adaptability come at a premium. Those two cost $4.90 per month and $2.90 per month, respectively, but most PowerPlugs, including all of the other aforementioned options, are free.
(Credit: Ultrahuman/PCMag)
Not all of the info gathered by the different PowerPlugs comes directly from the Ring Air. Some, like Screentime, extrapolate information from your phone, and most use data tracked for other cards like sleep and just interpret the data in a new way. Others, like Caffeine Window, require more active input from you so the app knows how much coffee you’re drinking. Nevertheless, I appreciate the large variety of options and customizability. The Ultrahuman app can interpret your data in a myriad of ways to help you focus on specific areas where you might want to improve your health.
Every other feature is included except the premium PowerPlugs. The Samsung Galaxy Ring also has a fee-free app experience, but the Oura Ring 4 costs $5.99 monthly or $69.99 annually after a one-month free trial.
Notification and Syncing
One downside to the Ultrahuman app and its many PowerPlugs comes in the form of notifications. With just two PowerPlugs activated, Ultrahuman still sent me roughly ten to fifteen notifications per day, with some days stretching beyond that range. It notified me especially often in the mornings, and on some mornings it felt like I got a new notification from the app every time I tried to set my phone down. Notifications include new weekly reports, sleep reports, HRV reports, low battery warnings, caffeine window alerts, and more.
This is customizable to an extent, as you can freely activate and deactivate certain plugs, and the Caffeine Permissible Window led to three to four notifications per day on its own. But I wish the app had the option to turn down notification frequency in general, aside from just turning off plugs that I found useful or blocking some notifications with my phone’s settings.
The app’s sync speed also annoyed me. When I first opened the app for the day from any of the morning’s many notifications, it would take 30 seconds to a minute to sync and provide current stats. It only took a few seconds on subsequent visits to the app, but the initial long sync occasionally discouraged me from opening notifications. The slow sync isn’t a deal breaker, but losing a minute to it every day can add up. This also stands out as one area where the Ultrahuman app isn’t as polished as the Oura app or the Samsung Galaxy Health, both of which reliably sync data within moments.
Insights
I wore the Ring Air consistently for more than a month, and I regularly forgot I was wearing it due to its comfortable feel and unobtrusive design. Ultrahuman doesn’t specify which side of the ring should face toward your palm, but I didn’t notice any deviations in data as it naturally rotated throughout my time wearing it.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
I made an effort to follow the ring’s instructions for when to work out and when to consume caffeine, and noticed a minor bump in my energy. These benefits could be more pronounced over a longer period of time and with increased diligence.
During the testing period, I also noticed a minor bit of progress on my weekly reports in the Ultrahuman app. The reports appear every Monday and provide a detailed breakdown of how your movement, recovery (from exercise and stress), and sleep have progressed over time. The top of the page gives you a score for all three, with a simple arrow indicating if you’ve improved or gotten worse.
The app also provides details on the three categories to explain your scores. Under sleep, it shows metrics such as your body temperature deviation and restorative slumber, and whether those stats have improved over time, along with a percentage quantifying your progress or regress. Under movement, it shows your active hours, steps, and workout frequency. If your numbers start to slip, it offers advice about steps you can take to improve them. For instance, when my step count dropped 23% in a week, it suggested I prioritize a walk early in the day. Finally, recovery breaks down your resting heart rate, sleep quotient, and temperature, with bar graphs and percentages to help you interpret your data.
(Credit: Ultrahuman/PCMag)
These robust health reports proved to be one of my favorite features of the Ring Air and its app. They offer detailed information and give you a bird’s-eye view of your metrics to help you make gradual improvements over time.
Sleep Tracking
Each morning after you wear it to bed, the Ultrahuman Ring Air gives a Sleep Index score on a scale out of 100. The sleep card on the main app page shows the score along with your sleep duration, number of sleep cycles, and an overall assessment with a recommendation based on how much shut-eye you got.
Tapping the main sleep card pulls up more details, including a color-coded bar graph of the factors that contributed to your Sleep Index for the previous night and a chart that tracks your scores over time. It also offers both static values and long-term trend graphs for other supported overnight metrics such as your alertness, average oxygen saturation, heart rate variability, sleep stages, and tosses and turns.
(Credit: Ultrahuman/PCMag)
You can tap the i button near any metric for more information about it or click on any Sleep Index contributor, like consistency, efficiency, or restfulness, for additional details and trend data. The app also shows your sleep total against its recommended amount, making it easy to see whether you were successful or not.
The sleep debt card on the main app page offers a recommendation for what time to go to bed and how long to sleep that night based on your recent slumber. Tap that card to see your sleep debt graphed over the course of the week.
The Ring Air’s overnight heart rate numbers aligned closely with those of the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Ultrahuman generally gave me credit for a little less sleep than Apple, showing more time awake in the phases chart, but its numbers otherwise lined up well for the most part and matched my anecdotal experience.
The Oura Ring 4 also does an excellent job of assessing sleep with a similar variety of data. It offers a sleep score with detailed insights and measures breathing regularity, but doesn’t clearly chart sleep debt in the same way as the Ring Air. The Samsung Galaxy Ring adds snore tracking when paired with a Samsung phone, and otherwise tracks lots of sleep details as well, but it regularly had gaps in its testing data, reducing its accuracy to an extent.
Exercise Tracking
Though the Ultrahuman Ring Air is primarily a sleep and recovery tracker, it also offers basic exercise monitoring with support for stats like calories burned, distance traveled, and steps taken. It also monitors oxygen utilization during exercise and recovery (VO2 Max) and tracks heart rate continuously throughout the day and night.
The Ring Air automatically recognizes and tracks a variety of workouts and grades them on an intensity scale when scoring your activity levels for the week. It also has a beta mode that lets you manually start tracking a workout through the app for live heart rate information and a breakdown of heart rate zones during the session. It currently supports tracking more than 50 different types of workouts, but the app warns you that this mode drains the battery quicker than usual. You can also use the app to track breathwork, another beta feature.
I tested the Ring Air’s automatic tracking on a run while wearing the Apple Watch Ultra 2 for comparison. The ring started tracking the run late and organized my heart rate data into zones without providing specific beats-per-minute (bpm) values at any given time. The heart rate surges and dips it reported generally matched my experience, with the ring accurately showing I was in a higher zone toward the end of the workout when I started sprinting at intervals. Overall, however, the ring’s heart rate data appeared to skew lower than Apple’s for the session.
That trend was even more apparent when I manually tracked a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout alongside the Apple Watch Ultra 2. The ring’s heart rate numbers skewed low by roughly 30 beats per minute, which is a big enough difference to be in a different heart rate zone entirely.
(Credit: Ultrahuman/PCMag)
Even after a workout, whether manually or automatically tracked, the Ultrahuman app doesn’t provide much detailed information beyond your heart rate data. Ultrahuman’s workout tracking needs more data and improved accuracy to really be useful, but again, the live tracking feature is in beta.
Generally speaking, smart rings aren’t as good at workout tracking as wrist-based fitness trackers or smartwatches, but the Oura Ring 4 comes closest. It can automatically track 40 different types of workouts and will notice and count ordinary activities like housework as active time. The Oura Ring 4 lets you manually track five different types of activities, and it generally shows detailed and accurate workout heart rate metrics, including your average pulse and time spent in each zone, as well as calories, pace, and time.
The Galaxy Ring tracks running cadence in addition to Oura’s workout metrics. However, it supports fewer workout types and showed minor inaccuracies when measuring heart rate and step count in testing. However, the Galaxy Ring’s heart rate numbers were much closer to the Ultra 2’s benchmark values than Ring Air’s.
For more granular workout details, you still need a wrist-based tracker. For running in particular, the Apple Watch Series 10, the Galaxy Watch 7, and the Pixel Watch 3 all capture advanced form metrics like ground contact time, power, and vertical oscillation. Devices with a screen are also obviously easier to check during a workout if you want to see your heart rate without pulling out your phone.
Verdict: Capable Finger-Based Health Tracking
The $349 Ultrahuman Ring Air costs the same as the Oura Ring 4 up front and gives you just about everything you need without a monthly fee. The Ring Air accurately tracks sleep and stress with extensive details, and its customizable companion app allows you to add a variety of wellness stats, such as your ideal caffeine intake window. That said, Ultrahuman can be aggressive in sending notifications, the app can feel slow when syncing data from the ring, and heart rate readings were inconsistent in testing. By contrast, the Oura Ring 4 offers smoother syncing, more accurate and detailed workout metrics, and longer battery life, so it remains our Editors’ Choice winner.
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The Bottom Line
The Ultrahuman Ring Air can track a variety of unique wellness criteria like caffeination and circadian rhythms in addition to core stats like sleep and stress, though it doesn’t quite unseat the Oura for best smart ring.
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About Andrew Gebhart
Senior Analyst, Smart Home and Wearables
