For movement, the Ring Air counts your steps, logs exercise, and estimates your cardiovascular fitness and blood oxygen levels (sadly, these last two are not available in the Android app yet). I like that it focuses on movement throughout the day and nudges you to stir when you have been sedentary for too long. Regular movement is prized over one big workout if you're sitting at your desk for hours.
Unfortunately, the workout tracking, which is still in beta, is flaky. You have to trigger it manually, and the activity options are limited. The Ultrahuman app shows heart rate zones and calories burned at the end of the workout. Twice, I started tracking workouts, only to have the data disappear. The Ring Air also consistently fails to record my heart rate accurately. I can hit 150 beats per minute on the Apple Watch, but the Ring Air often says I’m still at 80 bpm or less. Since it is a work in progress, I'm keeping my fingers crossed it improves. My heart rate outside of workouts appears to be accurate and matches other trackers.
Where the Ultrahuman Ring Air has been strongest is sleep tracking. I recently wrote a sleep tracker guide, comparing data across devices, and the Ring Air came closest to an accurate reflection of my slumber. It breaks out the stages (awake, REM, light, and deep), shows your heart rate variability (HRV), and tracks skin temperature. You can also log how you feel (tired, ready for action, or somewhere in between).
The Ring Air makes suggestions based on your circadian rhythm and the time of day. Get sunlight in the morning, delay stimulants until adenosine has cleared, and remember to stop drinking coffee toward the end of the day. It also uses heart rate drop as an indicator of recovery (if your heart rate drops earlier in the night, you recover better) and suggests reasons why it may not have fallen as quickly, such as meals too close to bedtime or alcohol. This is all commonsense stuff, and there’s a fair bit of unnecessary jargon when simpler language would suffice, but it helps to get nudges throughout the day.
The app can feel complex at first, but dig into any of the elements being tracked or extrapolated, and you will find an explanation of why this metric is important and what it tells you. The color coding helps, with green indicating that a measurement is within your target range and red highlighting potential problems.
Ultrahuman also compiles a weekly report showing trends to highlight where you have improved and what needs further improvement. Stat junkies will love this, but it might be overwhelming if you prefer a simple overview. There is also a tab with meditations, workouts, and sleep stories. There’s a fair bit of content in there, and the production values are good.
Sadly, one tab in the app is just an advert for Ultrahuman’s M1 glucose monitoring patch. The app has had multiple updates since I started testing, so it is improving. But I think the event logging is clunky. As well as recording workouts, you can log activities or sleep after the fact, log what you eat, and input your weight. There’s an “Other” category for anything else you want to record. But the app could do a better job of integrating all of this data.
