I recently bought a magical ring, they call quite lamely the 'Ringconn V2'.

Practically a week alter, the new 3rd version gets released. So that's cool, whatever.

But despite my general aversion to becoming all Techno-dependent and AI-heavy, charging every aspect of my life with electricity and so forth - I actually enjoy the information it provides and is genuinely helpful.

It's essentially a health tracker in ring form and it's honestly packing so much in what is barely any bigger than my wedding ring - with a ten day battery life.

I decided to go all in on a pretty decent one because I found out some intimidating info about my family genes. Although estranged from my dad for, what, 6 years or so now? I did hear through the grapevine that he had collapsed one day on the street and had some sort of heart-valve attack, which turns out to be hereditary.

At the same time, my mum has passed down some heart issues too, while also just recently discovering that there is a gene being passed down through most family members giving everybody cancer. If she has the gene too (to be announced), there's a 60% chance it will target her too, which doctors have recommended getting half her body parts surgically removed ahead of time it's that serious.

And if she has it, then I get a solid 20-30% chance of getting either prostate or testicular cancer compared to the average person, too. So I have a lot to pay attention to.

With prostate cancer, it would be a bit different; more aggressive and spring upon you more quickly than if you didn't have this gene, but even so, a massive factor in preventing it still applies: Good health, good diet.

With the heart issues, one of them I've known about most my life and I've always had a kind of background paranoia about my irregular heart rate and for a while, every time I tested the tempo, it was averaging about 100bpm even at rest which for my condition was to be expected and freaks me out. Ever since I started my health journey though (before the previous posts extra-heavy journey of lifting weights, so a couple of years ago at least), it seemed like my heart rate lowered to something more normal; high 80's, with some random fluctuations up beyond 100.

And that's where my ring came in.

Heart rate

It turns out, nowadays, my heart beats at an average of about 75bpm, and when sleeping, this lowers to 55-60. All this is in completely normal range. When I do exercise, it doesn't raise any alarm bells, either. A couple of weeks of this shows it's consistent throughout my life and is a massive frickin' relief to see. Rather than make me more of a hypochondriac, my ring has actually diffused some of those fears.

Heart rate variability

This is a new one I didn't know about. Apparently, when your body is chill, your heart naturally varies quite widely throughout the day. In any given few minutes, its speed can vary from like 70-85 in my case, and that's a good thing. But when you're feeling stressed or your body is dealing with something troublesome, your heart stabilises and variability drops. This ring can detect that change and make some assumptions from it such as:

Stress

At first I was skeptical about this. Sometimes my stress readings were high when I was lying on the sofa chuckling at instagram vids, or lying in bed with my wife and a candle going. Other times I'd actually have a bit of a stressful day at work, and it would show me as being super chill.

But it turns out stress works a bit differently than we think about it in a casual daily sense. Stress can be good and bad for a start (something the ring doesn't distinguish), and if you're someone like me with various aches and pains you've learnt to ignore, they might be making your heart rate stable to work hard on dealing with it, thus increasing the stress load on your body.

If you have incense burning, the fumes are actually quite toxic and while you're consciously enjoying the scent and acting all zen, in reality your body is fighting hard to cleanse that sh*t from your lungs, increasing stress.

That being said, the ultimate test was just the other day when I had an extraordinarily stressful 24 hours I'd rather not talk about, followed by the next day of relief. It really showed up:

I had one or two red events over the last couple of weeks, but eight?? and surrounded entirely by dark blue isn't good either.

The ring didn't exactly help in this situation - I already knew I was stressed out, duh. But it reflects an accuracy that allows me to appreciate the other occasions when it signifies stress when I'm not actually aware of it, so I can look around and identify potential causes. This is more interesting than it is useful though, for sure.

SPO2

This has been very insightful. Using data from refractive lights beaming into my finger, the ring can tell how much oxygen is flowing around your body's blood supply. Most healthy people should be 95-100% at any given time, but in my case, it seems a bit lower on average. More alarmingly, when I sleep, this drops several times to as low as 82%.

Now, this makes me highly skeptical because at levels that low you'd probably need an oxygen mask to survive and you'd certainly need to be rushed to hospital with 'severe hypoxemia'. On at least one occasion, it has dropped to that amount while I was awake, after my morning alarm went off. You'd think I'd notice such a thing.

But it turns out the ring obviously isn't medical-grade perfection, and if it's a bit loose, or been nudged out of place, or in my case I tend to sleep on my arm until it goes numb, these things will affect those readings substantially too.

However, it has been fairly consistent that at least once per night, my oxygen levels do in fact drop and the ring is confirmed to be about 90% accurate in this regard.

So I tried out using one of the special features:

Sleep Apnea

This one you have to turn on and then it will go through a 3-day process of monitoring your sleep in much higher detail. If there's a certain number of suspicious events throughout each of the three nights, you are given a risk level on having Sleep Apnea.

After doing this twice, my ring concluded no abnormal events and sleep apnea was low to no risk in my case in those 6 days.

But it didn't actually detect no abnormal events, it detected quite a few, just not quite enough to pass the required barrier into an apnea diagnosis.

This to me suggests there's certainly something going on in my sleep every night, but not enough to wake up my wife at any given time. My sleep quality is fine, I don't wake up with headaches or trouble concentrating/staying awake all day. I never found myself gasping or choking. But SOMETHING is going on. I am still investigating.

Sleep

Its sleep functions are really accurate and I learnt I'm not getting nearly as much sleep as I need. In a work week I'm only sleeping 5.5 - 6 hours a night. I knew I didn't sleep enough but I just kinda rounded up in my head to at least 6.5.

This is my own fault, as I have to wake up very early, while my wife doesn't, and she comes home later. This means we don't get much time to see each other, so I take the hit and stay up until as late as 1am sometimes. Honestly I feel fine with that much sleep... or so I think. But I do take naps at work occasionally - and my ring accurately writes this down too, even the specific duration I had dozed off (usually 20-25 minutes - my job is easy).

It breaks things down further to show how much of my sleep was 'awake' (normal to wake up a few times per night), REM, light and deep sleep. Deep sleep I've learnt tends to happen entirely in the first half of sleep.

So now I'm trying to encourage myself to go bed earlier even if the wife is still up and about. I guess we can't always go to bed together, at least in our current working lifestyle!

Step counts & Calorie burn

This part I think is probably not that accurate and if you really want that data you'd be better with a smart watch tbh. But I do log my workout and cycling activities so it learns a better context for my heart rate and such which does seem to have a positive effect on how it reads my day-to-day life.

Skin temperature & respiratory rate

I mean, impressive I guess but I'm not really sure what the point in these are just yet.

VO2 Max

Honestly, the more I press buttons, the more I discover. Each of the above examples have multiple other layers and pages to dig into if you want. The most recent thing I only just discovered was the ring can figure out your Vo2 max, which is a very important indicator - one of the strongest indicators of cardiovascular health.

I've learnt that, although I tell myself I'm doing plenty. It still seems I'm not really doing enough. Although I cycle every day when possible in a work week, and I keep a relatively intense pace as I go, it's only for about 15 minutes each time.

When it comes to strength training, this doesn't really do anything at all for cardio. The result is that my VO2 reading isn't particularly great - my job is mostly sedentary, after all.

This 'meets the basic health standard', but I'm no longer satisfied with basic health standard. I want to get at least the green middle section!

The problem is I just hate all forms of cardio. It's just not fun outside of sports which at my age and with my injuries, you are pretty limited on which ones you can do.

Clearly though, there's still room for improvement.

Other bits and bobs that are fun

The ring can apparently predict when you're about to get a headache and send warning notifications. I got a pretty bad headache yesterday and I didn't get any warnings so I guess that's pretty bunk.

It does have a cool 'find my ring' thing though. If you leave it somewhere you can do a kind of easter egg hunt with your phone where it tells you if you're getting warmer or colder until you're practically standing on it. That's awesome.

When I do activities, it automatically detects and makes assumptions based on your routines and its own data on what that activity was. It's pretty accurate but not fool proof. One time it detected jogging when it... wasn't jogging, let's say.

Finally I just want to emphasize just how far this technology has come; all these features, with 10 days of battery, in something as inconspicuous as this:

I'm not getting paid for this btw. I just think it's super cool. The new version even claims to read blood pressure, but who knows how accurate that is. I don't think any of this is accurate enough to be an actual diagnostic tool - one of the first things it says to you is not to think of it like that. But if you do have issues, I bet it would be valuable context for a doctor to look at. It's certainly accurate within its own data (so, step count might not be perfect, but it will be accurate to say one day has fewer steps than another).

I also love that it's not subscription-based like some others. This is some high quality sh*t as far as I'm concerned, that I get permanent access to.

And the last thing I love is this version comes with a charging case where your ring magnetically snaps in place and which provides another 150 days of power. So it you go on a sailboat journey around the world, you won't even need to bring a solar panel to keep it going - just charge up before you leave and you're good to go. Crazy.

That being said, I kinda wish I went for the cheaper option. It hasn't got the Apnea feature which I don't think is too important, and doesn't have the charging case but instead a little USB charging hole which I'd argue is way more universal and therefore better since you can charge literally anywhere - unless you go on a sailboat trip around the world.

The battery only lasts about a year, from what I've been reading. It just kinda fizzles out to the point that it's barely usable which is really disappointing but I mean... look at the size of it.

In conclusion: Fantastic Christmas Gift if you know the person's ring size!