Leaf&Core

Smart Rings vs Smart Watches: Which is Smarter?

Danielle from Leaf and Core
Reading Time: 5 minutes.
Samsung Galaxy Watch with a Swatch

Real watches over smart watches, every time

I was thinking today that I should pop my Apple Watch on my wrist to measure my heart health as I recover from an injury. However, I also still have some wrist pain as a result of that injury. I can’t wear a wrist brace and my Apple Watch. And I can’t use my other wrist because it’s covered in tattoos. Apple didn’t plan for people with tattoos on their upper wrists, as the Apple Watch doesn’t work through those tattoos.

People get tattoos all over. Wrists, arms, hands, legs, torsos, even the lower back! The way the Apple Watch works is by shining bright light into the skin and measuring the changes in the light that’s reflected back to the sensors on the underside of the Apple Watch. But this doesn’t work through tattooed skin.

This must be a huge problem in the medical industry, right? They use the same technology to measure heart rate too, right?

Well, yes and no.

If you’ve ever been hospitalized, or perhaps sometime you’ve gone to your doctor, you might have had a clip placed on one of your fingers. This works in a similar fashion to the Apple Watch, shining a light into your skin and measuring the changes to figure out things like heart rate. This equipment is far more accurate. Apple wanted to make a watch and then made the technology work for heart rate sensing. The finger clip was designed first with accuracy in mind, then application. Fingers are a better place to measure for heart rate. And do you know where people very rarely get tattoos? The bottoms of their fingers. This skin regenerates so quickly that tattoos become messy blobs far too quickly to be worth the effort of tattooing usually.

So, the fingers are a place where an extremely small number of people have tattoos, it’s far more accurate, and it’s a comfortable place to have a sensor. So why have we strapped our health sensors to our wrists instead of simply putting them on our fingers? It’s time we rethink health tech. It should be more like the sensors at the hospital than an iPhone on our appendages, and extension of our devices’ capabilities. The best form factor for that is the humble ring.

Why Watches Anyway?

Watches are easy. A watch takes up more space so it can have more hardware. You can have a user interface that’s familiar and ties to a brand, and in that, brand loyalty. You can sell accessories like different straps or bands. Watches can be marketed. They can house apps, getting developer interest. They increase participation in an ecosystem. Smart watches may not be a better product, but they have more profit avenues, and that makes them a better product for smart device manufacturers.

Smart watches work because Apple didn’t have to design much to make them work. It’s basically a sized-down iPhone. The design hasn’t been updated in a decade, and that design is based off an old and unpopular iPhone design. Apple made a smart watch instead of a smart ring because it was easier, cheaper, and more marketable. It could trap people in the ecosystem better than a UI-less smart ring. A smart watch is so much more Apple. It’s exploitative and ignores consumer needs in exchange for complexity and a closed ecosystem. That’s so Apple.

Are Smart Rings Smarter?

I believe more people would enjoy a smart ring than a smart watch, but it’s hard to say for sure. We haven’t had smart rings get the same features or attention that smart watches have. A smart ring doesn’t get in the way of your fashion, you can even wear multiple rings with it. It doesn’t need to have microphones or other sensors, it can be more of an extension of the capabilities of your smart device by adding those health sensors. That also means it can have incredible battery life, lasting weeks, not fractions of a day, like the Apple Watch. Smart watches have the opportunity to be more accurate, more comfortable, more private, and less obtrusive. Plus few people have a tattoo on the underside of their fingers anyway, so more people could use it.

With much of the market moving back to real watches because smartwatches are annoying and ugly, smart rings would follow the trend and consumer desire better than yet another boring smartwatch.

They certainly seem smarter, but would require investment in development and manufacturing that would vastly differ from current offerings for a company like Apple. That’s certainly a risk. But every new product is a risk, and isn’t a smart ring more likely to sell well than a super expensive pair of electronic ski goggles? It could even serve as a touch-free controller for your other Apple devices. There’s a host of benefits to smart rings that could make them the perfect next product for Apple.

Cons to Rings

But they haven’t done it yet. There could be a few reasons for that. The most likely reasons are associated with the upfront cost of introducing a new product category and risk. Apple was willing to take a risk developing the Vision Pro because they see a future in face-worn computing. But the consumer interest in smart rings hasn’t been as extreme. Then again, the same was true of smart watches before Apple released the Apple Watch. They were a niche product, like Pebble watches, owned by only the biggest nerds (like me!). Apple both normalized them and then pushed us away from them by being slow, annoying, and ugly.

Coming up with different sizes could be tricky, but Apple could focus on making a range of sizes in the proportions of frequent wearers. They could design the electronics to take up a small amount of space, leaving more area for the adjustable ring portion. It’s a large amount of segmentation, but Apple could bet on the most common sizes for their stock, reducing risk.

The biggest issue is likely how much Apple would lose to marketing. They’d have to make these smart rings unique. Ensure you can control devices with them, add gesture support. No one wants another annoying smart watch buzzing constantly, but the ability to quickly interact with your devices Minority Report-style could be a good marketing draw. Apple has avenues here to make something unique for their ecosystem now. They just have to think outside of the wrist-worn box.

Is Apple Considering Rings?

Rumor has it, Apple has been considering them for years. And every year, they were just “one year” away from launch. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who frequently has good ties to Apple’s development process, says Apple does not plan to release a smart ring anytime soon. That’s probably accurate.

A smart ring would be perfect for the growing number of people going back to real watches and people who, because of tattoos or other reasons, cannot use an Apple Watch, but still want to add sensors to their health tracking. As someone in both categories, it’s frustrating to see Apple won’t appeal to me with any wearables any time soon.

I’m sure I’ll be fine. When you really think about it, who cares? Perhaps you can learn to track your health in another way: journaling. How happy were you today? What brought you happiness, what brought you down? What can you do to increase your happiness? Live like that, because it’s the only metric that really matters. Everything else, from exercise, diet, and physical health, to creation, art, and socialization, is just to bring us more happy moments, and neither a watch nor a ring will give you that.

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