Ultrahuman Ring Air Review 2025

In the world of wearables, most watches, rings, and other body sensors all tell you roughly the same thing in a different package: step count, sleep quality, and how ready your body is to tackle the day ahead, all distilled into digestible information for beginners and health nuts alike.

While the Ultrahuman Ring Air may look like every other smart ring, it’s uniquely designed for people who want to go beyond basic health — people who are looking to improve their biological age, to understand how well their brain cleared glymphatic waste during sleep, and who are interested in their step count and sleep quality largely as a means to becoming their healthiest self ever.

First launched in 2022 on Kickstarter, the Ultrahuman rings are a very exciting (and unique) wearable for the biohacking community. And while the Ring Air is the lightest, sleekest, most advanced smart ring the company has launched yet, it’s not quite the Oura Ring killer that the biohacking community needs.

I’ve been testing smart rings and smartwatches for the better part of five months, and I wore the Ultrahuman Ring Air 24/7 for two months while I slept, worked out, walked, showered, and everything in between — and I was a bit underwhelmed. While the concept is great, there are serious holes in the technology — namely, a short battery life and inaccurate tracking — and the Ultrahuman app has a long way to go for even a very smart everyday person to understand exactly what their health data means.

Here’s my full experience testing the Ultrahuma Ring Air.

What I (mostly) like

Biohackers will love the analytics — but beginners will struggle.

While the vast majority of wearables deliver the same type of data and analytics — how hard your systems worked yesterday, how recovered your body is today, if you’ve moved often enough, if your skin temperature shows early signs of an illness — Ultrahuman is playing on a different field.

Beyond standard sleep stages, heart rate, and step counts, the ring and app report on brain recovery, cognitive readiness, and “phase advance” — a measure of your circadian rhythm timing — as well as a “caffeine window” showing the optimal times to have your last coffee of the day.

If you love granular biometrics and want to know how optimized your current habits and health are or how they’re contributing to your longevity, Ultrahuman will keep you busy.

However, if everything we just mentioned sounds like gibberish, this is not the ring for you.

While Ultrahuman does use sound science to apply its metrics to your health, it also assumes you already understand most of the science. Out of the box, it’s talking about “phase advance” and “light exposure timing” without explaining why you should care. I’ve been a health science writer for over 10 years, and I even had a hard time discerning what some of it meant without really sitting down and sifting through it.

There’s little layperson context, so unless you already know how circadian biology works, you may find yourself Googling terms just to understand your daily report.

It also doesn’t hold your hand on taking charge of your health. For example, if you’re under the weather, there’s no ability to put the ring into “rest” or “recovery” mode like other wearables let you do, so Ultrahuman is still encouraging activity when you should be on the couch. This can be hard for people who don’t slow down easily.

The brain health focus is unique and intriguing.

One standout metric of the Ultrahuman Ring Air is whether your brain’s glymphatic system (a kind of nightly waste-clearance process) has done its job, which can be influenced by sleep quality and timing. This metric is not something you’ll find on any other mainstream wearable, and it’s an interesting addition for anyone curious about neurohealth.

That said, it’s also a little cruel. When I woke up and learned my brain waste was only 60/100, I panicked a little and wondered what damage that was doing to my day. There isn’t a lot of guidance on how to improve it other than getting better sleep tonight (which is fair but not terribly helpful).

The app interface is polished — but could be clearer.

With smart rings, the app interface is 90% of the experience since it’s where you’re interpreting all your data. I found the Ultrahuman app to be polished and very on brand for the biohacker community, with a dark background and minimalist icons.

While it is easy on the eyes in many ways, it also feels crowded with information. There is a lot of text and not a lot of visual guidance on what is most important versus supplementary info. Ultrahuman uses a minimal color scheme, but the color coding isn’t very sensible — sleep and recovery metrics are both orange-yellow, but then sleep debt is green, the same as movement. Why isn’t all the sleep data one color, movement another, and recovery another?

It also scrolls and scrolls, making it hard to understand which information is the most important. Ultrahuman just released a “snapshot” feature in its latest update, which gives you at-a-glance data points like resting heart rate, steps, and active hours. This feature is indeed helpful (and customizable).

But it still crowds the interface with data I don’t fully know what to do with, like my sleep debt (does knowing I’m -0h 3m behind on my optimal sleep really need to be front and center among important data points?) and a countdown to when my circadian rhythm ends, with no clear explanation of what action I’m to take with his information.

Also unclear: After about a month of messing around in the app, I realized there’s a section called the PowerPlugs store with widgets you can add — many for free. Some are already pre-loaded onto my interface, like the Caffeine Window, but others I could add and felt would be genuinely helpful: a Vitamin D optimizer that tells you when and for how long to go out (helpful in the Northeast or PNW in winter), a social jetlag tracker to help you align your weekday and weekend schedules, and a smart alarm to give you a personalized wake-up time based on your sleep goals. These add-ons help maximize the value Ultrahuman aims to provide. I just don’t know why customizing this section isn’t part of the app setup.

Some of the health improvement advice is pretty helpful.

One thing Ultrahuman does right is provide actionable tips on how you can improve your numbers, namely around sleep. When you click into, say, your sleep index, Ultrahuman provides tip cards that have an illustration and two to three sentences of advice on the importance of and advice to improve your pre-bedtime routine, sleep environment, and things like avoiding food a few hours before sleep. Under the stats for your heart rate drop, Ultrahuman has tip cards with advice on ideal meal timing, fostering a calm sleep environment, and avoiding late-night stimulants.

I found the visual and concise advice in the tip sections to be very digestible and the information itself quite helpful. While it’s all generic advice of what might help you improve your numbers, it goes beyond the basics of “avoid caffeine late in the day” and “turn off the TV and screens an hour before bed” and gets into the nitty-gritty of what lesser-known stimulants might be keeping you up (late exercise, late meals), which is great for people who are already covering the basics.

Where it falls short

Battery life is a real weak point.

Battery life is one of the most important features of a wearable because the more often you have to charge it, the more dead periods you have in data recording (especially if you forget to put it back on right away).

Most smart rings I’ve tested last seven to eight days per charge; Ultrahuman barely makes it five. I’d charge it on a Tuesday and find it at 30% by Friday. And that’s in battery saving mode.

The data tracking is spotty.

It’s hard to know how accurate your biometrics are — unless you’re wearing three wearables at once, like I was during testing. And because of this, I can say with confidence: Ultrahuman’s tracking is a bit spotty.

The activity auto-detection is unreliable — it regularly missed lighter movement entirely (like a dog walk) and regularly undercounted my steps by roughly 1,000 compared to what my Oura Ring and Garmin were showing for the day. And unlike Oura or Garmin, there’s no smart learning over time to better identify what activity you’re doing.

The sleep tracking wasn’t terribly sensitive either. One night, I woke twice — once from a nightmare where I had trouble falling back asleep and again to shut a door — yet the ring recorded uninterrupted sleep. For a device that calculates things like your “biological age,” this blatant level of inaccuracy is hard to ignore.

That said, often my sleep quality and readiness score were on par with what my other wearables reported. But if you want to wear a smart ring to know precisely how many steps you’re getting in a day, I wouldn’t trust the Ultrahuman Ring Air.

It’s upping its women’s health game — but it’ll cost you.

Most every wearable now has some kind of women’s health component, from simply letting you track your period in the interface to acting as an unofficial basal body thermometer to predict your ovulation and fertile windows.

Ultrahuman has long offered the basics, but in August 2025, it launched more advanced tracking: Cycle & Ovulation Pro uses the technology of a proprietary algorithm called OvuSense that purports to track your cycle with 90% accuracy, predict ovulation even among irregular cycles, and flag hidden patterns, like a short luteal phase or early/late ovulation. One cool aspect of this new feature is that it also lets you log symptoms, mood, and other behaviors to have more insight into how your cycle affects you.

While I love to see more time and energy being put into women’s health in a health tracker, you have to pay extra for this feature — $4 a month or $40 a year. It’s not the end of the world when you consider Ultrahuman is otherwise free, and competitors like Oura charge a $6 a month subscription fee for all their extra features. But still, it’d be nice if it were included in the price of the ring.

Ultrahuman Ring Air vs. Oura Ring 4

The smart ring market is growing quickly, but there are really only a few brands worth considering. While the Samsung Galaxy Ring is sleek and accurate, it records rather basic metrics and offers pretty basic insights, so I wouldn’t say it’s ideal for anyone interested in the biohacking capabilities of the Ultrahuman Ring Air. You can read more in my Samsung Galaxy Ring review.

As for the Oura Ring 4 vs. Ultrahuman Ring Air, both rings target recovery and holistic health. But Ultrahuman’s bread and butter is really health insights for people who want to optimize their longevity and daily performance, and who aren’t afraid of digging into the numbers and science to get there. Oura, on the other hand, delivers its insights in a more approachable and digestible way for all levels, including beginners. Oura boils your data into three simple scores (readiness, sleep, and activity) with actionable tips and holds your hand a bit on how to feel better and more energized. Ultrahuman throws a lot of raw science at you, expecting you to read through the interpretation to reach the end goal of your healthiest, most optimized self.

If you want to experiment with circadian optimization, monitor caffeine timing, and track niche neuro metrics, Ultrahuman offers tools Oura doesn’t. But if you want to glance at your app and immediately know how to adjust your day, Oura’s simpler, more guided approach is the clear winner. You can read about my experience with Oura in my Oura Ring 4 review.

The bottom line

The Ultrahuman Ring Air is a powerhouse for biohackers and data lovers. It offers unique metrics on brain health, circadian timing, and longevity optimization that no other mainstream wearable matches. There’s definitely a learning curve to it, and you have to be comfortable digging into data and science to get the most out of it.

That said, for beginners or anyone who wants straightforward, actionable insights, it’s more confusing than helpful. Short battery life, spotty tracking, and a dense app you have to spend time with to gain value all make it best suited for people who already speak the language of sleep science and performance data — not those looking for an easy daily health check-in.

With a price tag of $350, I think there are better wearables for most people’s money. That said, if you don’t much care if you’re hitting 10,000 steps a day but are looking to improve your brain health and longevity, the Ultrahuman Ring Air can give you accurate enough insights that other wearables avoid going deep on.