Health Rings have quickly become a mainstream Smart Ring segment. Amid the rapidly intensifying coronavirus pandemic, more people are probably considering buying one. If you are one of them, you might be wondering: Are Health Rings actually doing what they are supposed to do?

There’s no other person who can answer this question better than Petri Hollmén, a COVID-19 survivor. Petri is a Finnish entrepreneur, CEO, enthusiastic sportsman, and a devoted family man who keeps his life in balance with the help of a Smart Ring. According to him, Health Rings can do wonders to your life, but you must know how to use them.

Read Petri Hollmén’s story on how his smart ring helped detect his COVID-19 symptoms.

Who Benefits from a Health Ring?

Well, anyone really. However, if you are looking for a stereotype user, Petri Hollmén could be the guy.

He is the entrepreneur of the year award winner in Finland in 2018. Petri is the founder and CEO of the growth company, Lyyti, the maker of the most used event management software in the Nordic Countries, and the TOP500 Deloitte Technology Fast company in EMEA. He is a big outdoors and sports enthusiast too. During his out-of-office time, he does skiing, rides MTB and road bicycle, and exercises triathlon, among the many other activities that generate sweat and adrenaline in large doses. At home, three kids and wife expect his full attention.

Needless to say – keeping this lifestyle in balance year after year requires excellent life management skills, including strict control of time, healthy living habits, and sufficient nightly rest. A Health Ring helps to do just that.

But, here’s the trick.

There is no specific user genre for Health Rings, because, it’s not even about the ring! Anyone who wants to get better control of life, sleep better, or feel more energized at work, can buy one – but the ring is not the key to success. The key is you!

5 Ways to Use Health Rings for Better Life Management

Here are his five best-practice tips for getting the most out of a Health Ring.

1. Better Life Management Depends on You, Not the Ring!

Today’s wearable technologies, such as sensor-packed Smart Rings, and mobile applications, have made tracking our activity effortless. Most devices are widely available, affordable, easy to use, comfortable, and even fashionable.

According to Petri, merely checking your activity score every day won’t make you a better person. Tracking helps you to boost your motivation to exercise and get your healthy lifestyle change going. But, you must be accountable to yourself, stick with your life improvement plan, and obey the data. If your sleep score drops, you need to act upon that data. Stop skimming your smartphone before the bedtime, skip the soothing glass of red wine, and go to bed early!‍

2. Learn the Basics of Human Body

The first challenge that you will likely face after having unboxed a wearable health device is the abundance of data the devices can track. Most of the data points, however, are not critical, and they won’t help you if you don’t have a basic understanding of what they mean. Here’s Petri’s tip for anyone starting with a Health  ring:

“It would help if you found out what are data points that your device measures, filter out the relevant information, and learn what the basics behind the various data points are.”

Ok, you don’t have to sign up for medical sciences lectures – here are a couple of links that will get you off the starting blocks:  

• What’s heart rate variability?
• How is the readiness score derived?
• What you should know about measuring heart rate?‍

3. Make a Long-term Commitment

The most essential thing when starting to use wearable health technology is to devote yourself to it for an extended period. Putting a Health Ring on the finger every now and then won’t help you at all. You have to have the patience to follow the trends over long, uninterrupted periods.

Petri reckoned that if he had not followed his daily biometrics over a long period, it would have been impossible to recognize the likely effect of the Covid-19 coronavirus on his Smart Ring data. And probably he would have skipped signing up for the medical check. ‍

“When I woke up, I felt quite normal. However, my Oura App gave me a low Readiness score – 54. It usually is around 80 or 90. I reckoned the reason for the low score was the body temperature, which was just 1 degree Celsius above my average body temperature.”

4. Establish a Daily Routine

A Health Ring is an excellent tool for listening to the signals of your body. When you follow the key parameters daily, over a long period, you will learn to pay attention to the right details. When you make Health  data check a daily routine, you will learn to know in advance if your body is getting exhausted, or, what are the early signals of flu, and so on.

5. Choose the Right Health Tracker

There is an abundance of health gadgets available today. It can be challenging to choose an ideal device to match your needs.

The advantages of Health Rings compared to other wearable form-factors such as wristbands is that they are light, and unnoticeable devices. They sit tightly on a finger and don’t fall off easily. Smart Ring doesn’t disturb you at work, or when asleep. Smart Rings can collect accurate heart rate data through the arteries in the fingers.

Here is a rundown of a few Health Rings that you consider for yourself:

Oura Ring – Oura is the market-leading Health  and activity monitoring Smart Ring with a particular focus on sleep tracking.

Motiv Ring – Motiv is a versatile smart ring that not only tracks your daily activities and sleeping patterns but also doubles as an online security tool.

Circular – Circular Smart Ring monitors your daily physical activities, including steps, distance, and calories, as well as your sleep habits, including your sleep quality and disturbances you experienced while sleeping.

In Conclusion

We are living in times when technology is indeed becoming an integral part of our lives and biorhythms. And that’s fine. The wearable devices can accurately turn our heart rate and other signals into valuable data. This helps us to live a healthier, more active, and, hopefully, longer life – as long as you remember to unwire yourself at times to get a little slack too!

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