What Are the Benefits of a Smart Ring?
Smart technology continues to grow and improve, being featured in pretty much everything you could think of.
Want a refrigerator that knows exactly what’s inside it? You can get one. Keen to have a watch that can accept and make phone calls? They are everywhere.
Now the latest craze is smart rings, which have been able to hit the market thanks to the fact that the technology that drives them is smaller than ever before. The good news is that that is only going to continue happening, meaning that the tech will grow and grow.
The question is, what’s the point of them?
What Are Smart Rings?
In simple terms, smart rings are wearable electronic devices that are small enough to fit in a piece of jewellery. That means that they offer on-the-go use, fitting on a finger or thumb depending on the preference of the user.
The most common feature of a smart ring is that of Near-Field Communication, which is the same technology as is built in the likes of contactless payment cards. It means that they can be used in place of cards or smartphones to make payments, for example, or be used for identification purposes. Depending on where you use them, they could let you into doors or replace car keys.
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Obviously each smart ring manufacturer will have their own remit for their use. Some will allow you to use them for gesture-based controls of other technologies, whilst others will use them in a stricter manner. There are some that are specifically fitness trackers, meaning that the likes of messages and incoming calls will not be reported by the ring.
What the ring that you buy is able to do will depend on which company you have decided to go with, so it is worth ensuring that you have opted for the one that is offering the kind of service that you most want to get from your ring.
Why People Use Them
The important thing to remember about smart rings is that they each offer something slightly different from one another. As a result, why you’d choose to use one is entirely up to you. In some ways, some of them are not all that dissimilar to smart watches, insomuch as they allow you to be given a notification in a discreet manner.
Unlike smart watches, which have the temptation to look at them in order to read your notification, the smart rings that give you notifications simply alert you to the fact that you need to look at your phone when you get a moment, rather than tempting you to look right away.
So I bought a smart ring. You can call me an idiot if you wish
— Josh S (@utahsysadmin.bsky.social) 28 April 2025 at 04:24
The most popular smart rings on the market, though, are those that don’t allow notifications at all. Instead, they are there to help track your health, giving you insights that might not otherwise have got without their usage.
They can automatically detect if you’re doing an activity, for example, so you can play tennis or engage in some other method of fitness and then find out afterwards how you did. They can track your sleep, keep an eye on your heart health and offer insights that will help you to improve your health living that can only be seen as a benefit in the long-term.
They’re Discreet But Helpful
The key thing about smart rings is that they are discreet. Although they have to be reasonably chunky in order to fit all of the tech inside, they are still pieces of jewellery to the outside world. That means that you can wear one any time, anywhere and no one will be any the wiser.
If you choose one that gives you notifications of calls or messages, for example, then you can know if someone is trying to get hold of you without looking at a more overt piece of technology. If you want to track fitness then you can do so without the necessity to wear something bulkier like a watch or fitness tracker.
The lack of distractions will be a key thing for many people, who are often sidetracked far too easily by their phone or smart watch. One of the problems with some smart rings is that they will require a subscription to get the most out of them, which adds an expense to the ring itself.
That being said, sometimes quality is worth paying for. Some rings will work with any phone or computer that you own in terms of getting the most out of the data, whilst others will be locked into a specific ecosystem. You will know better than anyone else what it is that you want to get our of your tech.