Metabolic Health Tracking Ring
Ultrahuman Ring is the world’s most advanced metabolism-tracker. It measures movement, sleep, and the body’s stress signals. With the help of biomarkers such as heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, and movement, the Ultrahuman Ring provides deep insights into your body. It’s coupled with intelligent real-time nudges that let help you take corrective measures and enhance your health.
We explored other wearables while we built a software platform for metabolic health. We soon realized that the insights we sought from those wearables were not deep enough. They weren’t accurate and the software didn’t help build sustainable positive behaviors for health. We sought deeper truths, and we soon realized that could only come from marrying great hardware with exceptional software.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware” – Alan Kay
Taking a page (or rather the whole book) from Alan Kay, we decided to move from being a software and data company to building our own hardware. The seed of building the Ultrahuman Ring was sown in Jan 2021.
At Ultrahuman, we believe in the idea of self-quantification. Ultrahuman Ring has been designed to empower you through various scores that are representative of your health such as Movement, Heart rate, HRV, and Sleep.
01. Movement Index
The movement index has been formulated to help you understand your overall energy expenditure. The score is based on metabolic equivalent (METs) and depends on how much you move throughout the day rather than just your workout for a specific duration during the day.
More movement spread across the day enables better metabolism and cardiovascular functioning. The score is based out of 100, with higher scores indicating more movement, more often.
02. Sleep Index
The sleep index is formulated to help you understand the different sleep stages such as Deep sleep, REM sleep, Light sleep and being Awake. During different stages of sleep, different metabolic processes of the body occur for growth, repair, restoration, and maintenance. If one sleeps late, they will likely skip Deep Sleep and go into REM Sleep. The body will get some deep sleep, but it will not last as long as it would, should you get a full night’s rest.
The longer one is awake, the more the increasing need for Deep Sleep. This could lead to autonomic dysfunctions (Increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, change in metabolism, production, and balance of fluids, etc) the next day.
03. Recovery Score
For the first time ever, get an understanding of your body’s current state with the recovery score; this acts as an index for your body. It is based on a combination of biometrics such as HRV, Heart Rate, and Body Temperature throughout the day to help you understand various body signals better.
Get cues through your heart rate variability (HRV) to indicate your stress levels. If the recovery score recognizes that you are in a stressful state, it will nudge you towards an appropriate meditation, breathing exercise or workout through Ultrahuman’s library of premium content. This includes workouts, meditations, and sleep stories through the world’s best trainers, coaches and psychologists. This gives you insights that you can be aware of and corrective action points that you can adapt to.
Ultrahuman M1 is a CGM-powered platform that correlates with the Ultrahuman Ring.
The CGM data from Ultrahuman M1 and sleep, movement, and body indices from the Ultrahuman Ring allow you to generate deep correlations and predictive insights to help improve your metabolic health in a more holistic and meaningful way. With combined data from the ring and the CGM, you get predictive insights based on your metabolic profile.
For instance, you have already logged a slice of Pizza in the past and it gave you a sugar spike. The next time you log a slice of Pizza, the app will nudge you to achieve personalized movement goals to manage the spike based on your unique profile and movement data, enabled only by the interplay of hardware of the Ring and M1
Disclaimer: Please note that Ultrahuman M1 is not a part of any of the Indiegogo bundles and is separately sold by the company. You can learn about the product here.
Ring Prototype Heart Rate demo
Here we are comparing the Heart rate values as detected by the Ultrahuman Ring and compare the same with an Apple Watch’s HR readings using their real-time HR detection app.
Ultrahuman Ring App walkthrough
Here, we go through the Ultrahuman Ring app and deep dive in the design of each of the Indices we have created to keep your Metabolic Health in check.
The Ultrahuman Ring comes in a spectrum of elegant colors, appealing to both minimalists and aesthetes alike. Cyber Grey, Bionic Gold, Aster Black, Space Silver. Once you have placed your order, we will contact you through an email to help you select your ring size and your choice of color.
The Ultrahuman Ring is designed for enduring rough usage conditions and workouts. The ring’s outer surface is made of a Titanium body coated with Tungsten carbide which is 5 times harder than tool steel making it remarkably scratch resistant. At the same time, comfort and minimalism is at the core of the product.This is ensured by the smooth inner shell of the ring that makes it comfortable during sleep and rest scenarios.
Ring Dimensions
All dimensions are in mm. The Diameter indicates the inner diameter of the ring.
The Ultrahuman Ring has been tested to be water resistant upto 7ft, ensuring that you continue doing your daily chores or enjoy your day at the beach without worrying about the water. We are also in the process of getting the final IP rating where we are targeting IPX8 water resistance rating.
Available in 7 Sizes – US Size 6-12. A sizing kit will be sent to you before the final product is shipped to help place an accurate size.
What is HRV and how is it tracked?
HRV can help us to learn how different internal systems react on a daily basis. Managing the HRV system is crucial for better health and performance. A quantified recovery process can help program training loads, avoid injuries, and control states of mind under pressure.
Why Sleep?
Our sleep-wake cycle is controlled by our circadian rhythm, an internal biological clock that interprets the environment and controls hormone release to dictate our behaviour. Wearable technology uses sensors to track important parameters in individuals while they sleep—such as heart rate and blood oxygen and CO2 levels. here are two potential drawbacks of wearables—lack of standardization of metrics and accuracy compared to the gold-standard PSG sleep test.
Why Movement?
The amount of movement and activity we do on a specific day is not the only thing that matters for our metabolic health and longevity of our body functions; the time and frequency of this activity also matter. Unlike other wearables, for calculating your daily movement index, we also factor in your movement density throughout the day and send regular nudges if you are inactive for some time.
Existing investors include Alpha Wave, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Utsav Somani’s iSeed fund, and a range of other angel investors including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer.
Others influential leaders include Balaji Srinivasan (ex-Coinbase), Nithin Kamath (founder of Zerodha via Rainmatter), Preethi Kasireddy (ex-a16z), Groww founders (Harsh Jain, Lalit Keshre, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal), Razorpay founder, Harshil Mathur and RazorpayX GM – Shashank Mehta, Akshay BD (founding team Uber India) and Tanmay Bhat (celebrity content creator and investor)
Ultrahuman was started by a group of bio-hackers with a background in tech. The idea originated by looking at athletes using cutting-edge sports technology to enhance their performance. With a background in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, cycling, sports, and CrossFit, the team observed athletes closely and understood how performance can be enhanced with the smart use of data, recovery tools, and protocols.
We worked closely with normal individuals and athletes to understand metabolic biomarkers, creating underlying algorithms tuned to improve metabolism. The collective, data-driven effort has brought a revolutionary product to the production lines.
The team consists of serial entrepreneurs with a deep-seeded interest in improving the world’s health. We are backed by top global VCs and are working with manufacturing and logistics partners across 5 countries with over 30 years of experience building future first hardware products.
Ultrahuman Ring Charger
The ring comes with a Wireless charging dock. To charge the ring, it’s placed on the dock where the dock should be connected to a USB power source via the USB C cable that comes along with the Ring box.
We built the Ultrahuman Ring to help you track your metabolic health in deeper detail using the most crucial biomarkers conveniently. The Ring provides a minimal form factor with no screens or vibrations keeping you away from constant notifications. You check your details when you want to, on the app, ensuring no intrusion in your daily activities. It also comes with power-packed 5-day battery life. Free from distractions and a constant bombardment of notifications, you have complete control over your health.
We started building the Ultrahuman Ring in January 2021, which started with finding the best talent in the country, finding and partnering with the best medium scale manufacturing facilities and rushing to manufacture the ring in a timeline that would keep our investors happy.
We got to the first working prototype of the Ring in June 2021.
The idea was to always build a product that’s designed for perfection from the beginning and quality of mechanical manufacturing was a very big part. As soon as we finalized on the Industrial design of the ring, our mechanical team started working on finalizing the material that goes inside the ring- that touches the finger and the mould design of the ring in which this inner transparent part will be casted. Working with manufacturers and jewelers with over 30 years of experience, we started this journey to build a ring that feels more comfortable to wear than any typical metal rings people are used to wearing.
Finally, after close to 4 iterations on the PCB itself working with multiple design partners and our in house team in parallel, we received our first working flexible PCB in March 2022, this was when we realized that the idea has come fruition as a product now.
Here are a few images from different vendors working on different aspects of the Ultrahuman Ring’s production including the CNC vendor machining each ring, the assembly vendor inspecting quality of an assembled ring, the PCB’s being assembled with components on a machine capable of assembling 1000 units every day.
We start shipping all rewards April 2023 onwards. Our production facility is in Bangalore, India and we be shipping all orders from India. We are providing Free Shipping globally for all orders placed via Indiegogo.
Ultrahuman Ring may be subject to taxes, customs duties and fees levied by the destination country (“Import Fees”). The recipient of the shipment is the importer of record in the destination country and is responsible for all Import Fees and taxes.
Risks and challenges:
Investments:
Our company has raised a total of USD25Mn already from global VC’s, we have already spent 1.5 years in RnD to build the product and have the final version of the product in our hands today. Unlike companies that may require additional capital to go for production after running a successful Indiegogo campaign, we have no such challenge and are confident to deliver the rings to you in time in this respect.
Manufacturing:
We have partnered with manufacturing partners that have over 20+ years of experience in building electronic products spread across 3 countries and we have already started manufacturing a few units of the Ultrahuman ring so as to verify our production process. We have pre-planned the sourcing of all electronic components and have committed timelines to receive the same well in advance as per our production schedule. We have made our best efforts to mass produce the Ultrahuman ring at the planned time and have kept enough buffer to deliver the product to you within the promised time. At the time of launching the campaign, we don’t foresee any major challenge that could be an issue here as well.
Logistics:
We have partnered with market leading logistics companies like DHL and Bluedart and have been shipping our existing products via these partners in India, the UK and the UAE. We are already in talks with them and their partners to setup warehouses in countries from which we expect the highest orders. We are well prepared to take up on any challenge in shipping the Ultrahuman ring to you, but there could be factors beyond our control as we have seen during the pandemic which could affect the timely and convenient delivery of the product to you.
Long-lasting design
The Ultrahuman Ring is designed for enduring rough usage conditions and workouts. The ring’s outer surface is made of a titanium body coated with tungsten carbide which is 5 times harder than tool steel making it remarkably scratch resistant. At the same time, comfort and minimalism is at the core of the product.This is ensured by the smooth inner shell of the ring that makes it comfortable during sleep and rest scenarios.