There was a time when intelligent rings were what your level-three wizard wore in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Now Amazon will sell you one for less than a steak dinner for two.
For those willing to pay a little more, Oura now has smart rings that serve as a serious health-tracking platform. Samsung has also thrown its considerable weight behind computerized rings, and a growing pack of competitors is filling in the territory between them.
The latest company to catch my eye is British watch brand Sekonda, which has just launched its first smart ring for just £79.99 (around US$110). It tracks heart rate, sleep, skin temperature, stress, steps, and menstrual cycles. It is also water-resistant to 50 m (164 ft), claims up to seven days between charges, and doesn't require a subscription.
What makes Sekonda interesting isn't that it invented something revolutionary. It's that it hasn't had to.
A decade ago, smart rings were experimental technology. Oura's first-generation ring appeared in 2015, initially as a proof of concept for collecting enough physiological data to develop the science and algorithms behind it.
The original was a chunky affair. Subsequent generations predictably became smaller, more comfortable, and considerably smarter.
By 2024, the category had attracted Samsung, whose Galaxy Ring brought the format into the mainstream electronics market at US$399.99 with no monthly subscription. New Atlas noted at the time that Samsung was following the path already established by pioneers such as Oura, but its arrival was a clear sign that smart rings were no longer just an experimental niche.
Fast-forward to today and the basic sensor package has become almost mundane. Optical heart-rate sensors, accelerometers, and temperature sensors can now disappear inside something approximating an ordinary piece of jewelry, run for the better part of a week, and continuously collect data while their owner sleeps, works, and goes shopping.
And the finger turns out to be a rather good place to put them.
Most rings use photoplethysmography, or PPG – essentially shining light into the skin and measuring changes caused by blood flow. The finger has rich blood perfusion close enough to the surface to provide a strong optical signal. That's one reason medical pulse oximeters are clipped onto patients' fingers.
Recent reviews of smart-ring research have found strong performance for measurements including heart rate and heart-rate variability, while the tiny size and unobtrusive form make rings particularly well suited to overnight monitoring.
Sleep, in fact, may be the smart ring's killer application.
A watch is easy enough to wear during the day, but plenty of people don't particularly enjoy taking one to bed. A ring weighing a few grams is much easier to ignore. That allows it to collect night after night of heart rate, movement, temperature, and other data, looking for trends rather than taking the occasional snapshot.
That idea has real substance, but there's also reason to temper expectations. A 2026 systematic review covering 28 studies of finger-worn sleep devices found an overall 87% accuracy for distinguishing sleep from wakefulness. Identifying individual sleep stages was considerably less convincing, with pooled accuracy of 65% for light sleep, 81% for deep sleep, and 74% for REM sleep. In other words, your ring can help you track patterns, but it isn't a sleep laboratory wrapped around your finger.
Oura's current Ring 4 starts at US$349, and its full experience requires a membership costing US$5.99 a month or $69.99 annually in the US. Samsung's Galaxy Ring launched in Australia at AU$699, although Samsung doesn't charge a subscription for access to its health data. Both are substantial purchases.
Then there's Sekonda at £79.99, and below that an online marketplace full of smart rings costing pocket money.
The interesting question therefore isn't whether somebody can manufacture a cheap smart ring. Clearly they can. It's whether the inexpensive hardware and, perhaps more importantly, the software interpreting its output have become good enough that most people no longer need the expensive one. That's much harder to answer from a specification sheet.
It reminds me a little of the MP3-player market after the iPod took off. Apple had proved the idea, and suddenly some endless cheap players looked vaguely similar, promised the same basic job, and were usually exactly as good as their price suggested. Smart rings feel as though they’ve reached that stage now, except this time, established brands are starting to move down into the cheaper end of the market too.
A cheap optical sensor can produce a number called "heart rate", but turning streams of sensor data into useful assessments of sleep, recovery, stress and health trends is where years of algorithm development and validation start to matter. One recent systematic review of smart rings found impressive results across a growing body of medical research, but also warned that a substantial proportion of the studies it examined carried moderate-to-high risk of bias, and that proprietary algorithms remain a major obstacle to independent scrutiny.
There's another cost that doesn't appear on the price tag either, and one of my favorite topics: data.
Sekonda proudly advertises “no subscription ever,” but that doesn't mean your health data stays on your phone. Its own privacy policy says that when the ring is synced, data recorded by the device is transferred to Sekonda's servers. That can include heart rate, activity, sleep, and location data, which the company says may also be processed by affiliates and service providers, and data may be transmitted to Germany, Hong Kong, and other countries.
Users can withdraw consent and delete previously uploaded data through the app, but that's an after-the-fact control rather than a local-first design. The data still has to leave the device and reach remote servers used by the Sekonda Smart service for the service to work as described. Interestingly, the cloud isn’t technically necessary.
Open-source projects such as OpenRing can talk directly over Bluetooth to cheap Colmi smart rings with no account, app, or cloud service, while OpenCircuit does something similar with RingConn hardware, decoding the ring’s data locally and writing it straight to Apple Health.
That doesn’t make these polished mainstream alternatives, but it does prove an important point: the ring itself doesn’t inherently need to send your biometrics off to somebody else’s server. That part is largely a software and product-design choice.
It also doesn't make Sekonda unusual or imply something sinister. Cloud processing is deeply embedded in modern consumer technology. But biometrics are unusually intimate data, and as smart rings become cheap enough to be impulse purchases, buyers may want to spend as much time examining the app and privacy policy as the hardware wrapped around their finger.
Perhaps that's the real sign the smart ring has finally grown up.
The interesting question is no longer whether it's technically possible to squeeze useful sensors into a ring. We've not only answered that, but we can show that the technology is still moving. New Atlas recently covered an experimental smart ring developed at UC San Diego that goes beyond optical sensing entirely, analysing sweat for biomarkers including glucose and ketones.
So while consumer rings are getting dramatically cheaper at one end of the market, researchers are simultaneously pushing the form factor toward much more sophisticated health monitoring at the other.
Now the market is beginning to look like every other mature piece of consumer electronics: premium products selling sophisticated ecosystems at premium prices, established brands pushing downward, and a sea of cheap hardware rising from below. Sekonda's £80 ring sits right in the middle of that collision.
And if something this small and inexpensive can deliver most of the useful information people actually want from a wearable, the smartwatch may finally have some serious competition on its er… hands.
