This Ring Is an Almost Perfect Minimalist Fitness Tracker
I don’t like watches or bracelets, but I’ve been wearing a fitness tracker on my finger for the past few weeks. It knows how long I sleep and determines when I walk or run, and all I have to do is wear it as a piece of jewelry and forget about it.
Device – Motiv Ring . Its features and iOS app are minimal compared to what a Fitbit or Apple Watch can do, which partly explains why I like them. (Before Motiv, the only other fitness tracker I could use was the very low maintenance Misfit Flash .) I’m not sure exactly how they fit into the ring activity tracker, but I’m here for that.
The basics
Surprisingly, the ring is not oversized. It is about the size of a men’s wedding ring (8 mm wide) with a thicker part at the bottom of the finger. When you order a ring, the company actually sends you a box of seven plastic dummy rings so you can determine what size you want. In the instructions, it makes sense to wear the chosen size for 24 hours before making a final decision, because our fingers tend to swell and shrink during the day. Rings come in full sizes 6 to 12.
Motiv sent me a ring to try for the purpose of this review. I asked for rose gold instead of slate, then feared it wouldn’t really be cool to wear a shiny pink ring, but when it came it was in a nicer warm copper color.
My ring had to be charged every two to three days for 60-90 minutes. (Motiv says it lasts three to five days, but it never lasted more than three days for me.) It comes with two USB chargers, including one that slides into a keychain, so it was easy charge on my computer. or in the car.
Since you don’t need to charge it every night, you can wear the ring while you sleep. It’s also waterproof so you can wear it while washing your hands or showering. Motiv says you can swim with it too.
The ring has no screen, just a tiny light that changes color when charged or synced with your phone. (You can make it sync by spinning the ring around your finger, or ask it to ring on your phone by spinning it one way and then the other.) The ring doesn’t need to sync all the time, so you don’t have to worry if your phone dies or you prefer to walk to the gym without a phone. If necessary, it can store data for several days.
The biggest plus and the biggest disadvantage of a ring are the same: it’s a ring. This is a good thing if you don’t like wearing things on your wrist (drives me crazy as I type), but rings can also be hard to get used to. And if you train a lot with a barbell or pull-up bar, you might want to remove the ring midway through your workout.
It’s a great and simple sleep tracker
Inside the ring is a tiny photoplethysmograph, also known as a blinking green light, that measures your heart rate. (He checks you every few minutes, but if he thinks you are doing something interesting, he will measure continuously). Sometimes you will see it glow in a dark room, which I feared might disrupt my little daughter’s cave- like life . Wednesday before bed, when I put her to bed. (Luckily, she either didn’t notice or didn’t pay attention to it.)
The heart rate function is great for sleeping. Every night, Motiv measured my resting heart rate (HR), which is most accurately measured when you are completely still – perfect. If your RHR starts to creep up over time, it could be a sign that you are sick or that you’ve exercised too much and put your body under stress. But the better you get, the lower your RHR will be, so it’s nice to see a low or decreasing number.
Every morning I could check my RHR and see how much I slept. The Motiv ring doesn’t try to judge the quality of your sleep, which is great because a fitness tracker can’t actually tell how well you slept. But just tracking your sleep duration is handy so you can see trends over time. I recently sat up late a couple of nights and the app shows me this without any judgment. It just keeps track of my sleep over the last week and lets me decide how I feel about it. (Some patterns are getting pretty obvious, okay?)
He has no idea what I’m doing in my fitness class.
The ring also tracks steps, so if you walk or run, automatic activity is added to your day. This seems pretty accurate; no complaints. But when it comes to everything else, it’s delightfully naive.
For non-step-based actions, detection relies on a combination of steps and heart rate to figure out what’s going on. In the appendix, you will see a small question, for example: “8:38 – 8:52: were you active?”
Ironically, on my cycling days, the ring activated my activity as I walked from the car to the studio (especially if I was jogging due to being late), but paid no attention to the class itself. In a darkened bike studio, I finally figured out what went wrong: the ring slips out of position easily, so sometimes I saw a green glow on the top of my finger, flickering uselessly in the small gap that could form between your ring and yours. leather.
It helped to wear the ring on my finger where it was more snug, but no matter what I did, I could not get an accurate reading during high intensity activity. During several workouts in the last week or two, I measured my heart rate and got numbers between 136 and 192. The Motiv ring rarely showed anything above 150. Heart rate curves during my workouts often show periods of five or more minutes, where the ring speaks that I was at 70 or 100 bpm when I know for sure that I was in the middle of an intense sprint. If accurate heart rate is important to you during your workout, the Motiv Ring is not for you.
But I’m happy to just get a reminder to keep track of my exercises. “Were you active?” suits me, and it only takes a few seconds to ask this question and set up the start and end of the workout. Pro tip: don’t forget to choose “strenuous” if it was a hard workout; otherwise, your hourly sweating session may only give you 20 minutes of activity versus a week’s total.
Counting is a great part of the app. If you’re striving to reach your goal of 150 minutes of exercise per week (as recommended by the World Health Organization ), a weekly review of the app will show you how you do it and how many minutes per day you will need to achieve your goal for the rest of the week. I set a goal of 200 minutes instead of the standard 150, and I set a goal for two weeks in a row, so I feel like a complete badass. It’s worth noting that the WHO recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise, such as walking, or 75 minutes of more vigorous exercise, which Motiv tracks.
Bottom line
The Motiv ring does not irritate you. It does not require excessive analysis. It simply tells you when you sleep, how your resting heart rate is going, and with a little help it can track how much you exercise.
Either way, this is really all the data you can rely on from a fitness tracker . It would be nice to track my heart rate, but it wouldn’t change my motivation to exercise or my understanding of my own fitness.
The ring is priced at $ 199, as are the more fully featured devices. But I can’t come to terms with the fact that it’s a ring , so it doesn’t rub under my wrist when I type (like a bracelet) and I don’t have to remember to carry it over (as if I was pinching) from clothes to pajamas every night …
The Motiv ring is new, so maybe new features will be added. The app is currently for iOS only, but there is a partially working public beta for Android. Meanwhile, other companies are working on their own rings: the Oura ring has similar characteristics, but positions itself more as high-end jewelry.