Ultrahuman Combines Multiple Data Streams For A Complete Fitness and Health Picture

Update – As of 2/27/2024, the Ultrahuman M1 CGM is now available in the United States. Pricing has been included.

Technology has come a long way from the original fitness trackers we wore on our wrists that essentially tracked steps, floors climbed, and how often we stood up. We are able to collect so much more information now, which is helping give us a better overall picture of our current health and how different variables affect our bodies. Ultrahuman is looking to combine these technological advances into discrete wearables that will provide multiple streams of data to help provide a more in-depth picture of health and fitness.

Ultrahuman might be a bit of a new name for a lot of us, but maybe not as they have partnered with Team UAE Emirates and Team Bahrain Victorious. The company was founded in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal in Bangalore, India. Their original product was an app that provided at-home workouts, guided meditations, soundscapes, music, and bedtime stories to help you fall asleep. After the app release in early 2021, a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) based on the Abbott Libre sensor that became known as the M1, was launched in June. As Ultrahuman continued to expand, the R1 smart ring was launched in 2022, and most recently, the lighter weight Ring AIR. Their newest product, the Ultrahuman Home, looks to integrate date on your home environment into your overall picture.

The interesting thing about Ultrahuman is the ability to combine data from multiple devices under a single umbrella. Thinking about the products I currently use, I have a Whoop strapped to one arm, my Apple Watch Series 9 on the other, and have used other products like the Nutrisense CGM and Lumen metabolic analyzer. Each device tracks data and reports it back in its native app, but you’d be hard pressed to find meaningful data combined from multiple sources in a single app. Another great example is looking at my Whoop for my sleep and recovery data, but then having to cross reference my workouts in Strava or Wahoo’s site to analyze my power data. Yes, Apple has their Health app that does bring a lot of data together from various sources, but most of it is health focused or fairly basic.

With multiple devices from Ultrahuman, you are able to bring together sleep and activity data from the Ring AIR, metabolic data from the M1, and environmental data from Home, allowing the app to begin to understand how things like workouts, stress, nutrition, sleep, and environmental variables at home, like artificial light, air quality, temperature, and humidity, all come together to affect your health. To some, this might be data overload, but to many of us, this data sheds new insights into how we can improve our health and fitness, sometimes as easy as opening up the window shade and letting in some natural light.

Let’s dive in a little deeper.

Ring AIR

Ring Air is the evolution of the original R1. Functionally, they are the same, but the Ring Air slims the ring down, making it a little thinner around the finger. This also brings the weight down by a little over a gram. Okay, it might not be an earth shattering change, but it should make it even more comfortable to wear.

The Ring Air blends an aircraft grade of titanium with with a tungsten carbide carbon coating on the exterior with a medical-grade hypoallergenic epoxy resin to hold all of the electronics. Sensors include Infrared Photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor as a non-contact medical-grade skin temperature sensor, 6-axis motion sensors for motion, red LEDs for heart rate monitoring and oxygen saturation, along with green LEDs and infrared LEDs for heart rate monitoring. Additionally, you have a battery that is claimed to last six days, and a Bluetooth antenna to connect to your phone. Pretty impressive for the size of the ring.

What this all boils down to is the Ring AIR provides sleep, activity, and recovery insights without having a band on your wrist. Something that really caught my eye was the suggestions that it makes, based on your circadian rhythm. This includes things like getting sunlight at different parts of the day, better times to intake stimulants, like coffee, and matching bed times. All of these come in the form of gentle reminders through the app.

M1

The continuous glucose monitor is a bit of an emerging market in the fitness world. The technology was originally created for diabetics to be able to track their blood glucose levels instantly, without the need to prick their finger and draw blood. But CGM’s have found an alternative use to give non-diabetics greater insight to the same information that diabetics look for, how various inputs affect their blood sugar levels.

Whether you are a top level athlete, or just someone trying to get in better shape and improve their health, CGM’s can provide interesting information about how food, activity and sleep can all affect your blood glucose levels. I’ve had a chance to use one myself, and while it was limited to only a single two week sensor, it was interesting to see how different foods spiked my blood glucose levels, and the affect activity had on it. I was even able to see how different hydrations mixes I used had different affects, and helped shape my fueling strategy for some big events I have coming up.

The M1 uses Abbott’s popular Libre sensors, and connects to your phone to download information from the sensor. This allows you to track your information throughout the day, and remember those nudges from the Ring AIR, well, you’ll get them with the M1 too, alerting you when your glucose levels are on the rise and you could use a little activity to bring them in check. With the ability to track activity and food through the app, it will help you spot trends and understand how your body is working, providing a metabolic fitness report and fueling score daily.

As of late February 2024, M1 is now available in the United States and other parts of the world. Check Ultrahuman’s website to see if it is available in your area. For the US, a medical consultation is required, but it is just a step towards getting you started. For the launch, special pricing of $239 for one month (2 sensors), $559 for three months (6 sensors), and $1919 for one year (26 sensors) is available. After the promotion, you can get a reoccurring monthly subscription at $249 a month (2 sensors), or one time purchases at $299, $699, and $2399 respectively.

Blood Vision with UltraTrace

Blood Vision goes a bit deeper into things, literally, but shows Ultrahuman’s desire to correlate data from multiple sources. Blood Vision takes data collected from the Ring AIR and uses things like sleep, resting HR, HRV, and movement trends with specific markers in your blood, like cholesterol. For example, Ultrahuman can see improvements in your sleep and with Blood Vision using UltraTrace, it can show how it has helped improve your LDL levels. Using their algorithms, it can not only show you current data, and data over time, but can also help provide lifestyle recommendations that could help you on your journey to better health.

One thing that separates Blood Vision from your standard diagnostic tests you get through your local provider is that UltraHuman looks more at a more long-term approach and proactive health, rather than focusing on specific diseases.

Home

The Home module is one of the things that adds to the unique position that Ultrahuman has over other tracker device ecosystems. Home monitoring isn’t new, but linking it to fitness tracking is. At home, I do have a device that measures air quality, temperature, and a few other metrics like humidity and Radon levels, but it doesn’t connect with my fitness devices, like my Whoop. Other devices will give you individual scores, but nothing integrated in with trackers that can provide insights on how those environmental factors affect things like sleep.

The home tacks things like natural light spectrum, particulate matter in the air, noise levels, sleep disturbances, humidity levels, blue light exposure, smoke sensor, and continuous temperature monitoring.

For those of us in the US, we only have the Ring AIR. Other parts of the world have the M1 available to them now, and Home is currently available on Kickstarter with shipping planned for July 2024. We don’t have a lot of details on Blood Vision at the moment, but we are working with UltraHuman on the details on product offerings by region. We are also working to set up some product reviews which will follow later this year.

www.ultrahuman.com