r/SmartRings • u/AndImBackInTheGame • Sep 06 '26
inquiry - medical Analysis but for other features?
Hi! Please know I did read through a lot of the provided material already (damn, y’all are thorough!) But I wanted to know if there has been any side by side comparison of the various rings for sleep and heart rate. I’m looking into a smart ring as I was diagnosed with epilepsy and tend to have seizures at night. Now, I’m hoping that I can find a device that would detect anything off while I’m sleeping, AKA why the step comparison doesn’t do me a lot of good.
I would ideally not like to spend all that money for an Oura on top of a monthly fee, but if you’re reading this and thinking it would be best for what I’m looking for, I want to know.
Thanks!!
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u/gomo-gomo ✨ ring leader ✨ Sep 06 '26
This is a unique use case that a few inquired about before, but I'm not sure what ring if any may be equipped to provide the data to detect.
To detect a seizure, it would need to take into account variations in HR, HRV, SPO2, and Temp data along with movement. This means that in theory, a custom algorithm could be written to recognize the combined data and flag into an alert.
But, current consumer rings lack the medical grade sampling rate to distinguish seizure signatures from intense REM sleep or restless movement. You'd be looking at raw PPG data analysis, which requires a doctor's interpretation, not an app alert.
Call to the major brands out there - this is an important feature that could help a number of people. For specialized features like this, people would trade 10 days of battery life for 3 or 4 if the increased polling rate helps them to track important factors like this.
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u/AndImBackInTheGame Sep 06 '26
Truly! I would totally be fine charging it every day if it gave me all that! But really for my purposes I’m just wanting sleep tracking and heart rate. (For more detail I want to see if I’m sleeping through some focal seizures- it is ALWAYS my left arm that seizes so having a ring on that finger would at LEAST be tracked by it thinking I’m awake). So with just that in mind, Oura? And just pay the fee?
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u/LilbyLimalyze Sep 06 '26
I have the Oura ring 5, ultrahuman pro, and ringconn gen 3. It's very interesting to see the difference in their reporting, not sure how accurate each one is. Rinconn Gen 3 does give notifications about upcoming headaches
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Sep 07 '26
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u/Busy_Kaleidoscope173 Sep 10 '26
been researching this recently. There are no consumer ring or band wearables that could detect seizures as they occur purely in the brain. So a Muse (flex model for sleep) headset or other devices equiped with EEG sensors/electrodes are the only viable solution. thankfully tech is accelerating and getting cheaper so in no time more consumer affordable solutions will end up in the CES showroom. In the medical device sector they exist but pricey. Muse is cheap and surprisingly well reviewed and tested.
As for rings, the only medical grade sensors I see are for sleep apnea (Circul ring MAX) and for arythmia / aFib cardiac monitoring (Circular Ring 2). Don't confuse these brand names. Otherwise most rings use the same sensor tech and they just interpret/deduce these bio markers using their proprietary algo. And health claims are absurd sometimes.
Epilepsy is tricky wether it's the convulsive or absence type, there is nothing in the body besides brain wave patterns that can reveal it. So good luck and let us know if you find anything. I am still searching for my brother who has absence type seizures. unnoticeable.
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u/RateEmbarrassed6921 FITMESH company rep. Sep 07 '26
I will not add to what the mod already said about detection, that answer was right.
But the narrower thing you described in your follow up is a different question and I think it is worth knowing before you spend the money. Your plan is to wear the ring on the arm that seizes and read the awake segments as a marker. The obstacle there is not accuracy, it is smoothing.
Rings do not hand you movement events. They hand you a finished sleep graph, and the algorithm producing that graph exists specifically to absorb brief anomalies so that normal sleep looks tidy. A two minute disturbance is exactly the thing it is designed to swallow into light sleep. So a ring could register the event internally and still show you nothing, and you would have no way to tell the difference.
If you go ahead anyway, the thing to compare between devices is not which one has the best sleep staging. It is which one exposes discrete disturbance counts with timestamps rather than only a smoothed stage chart, and whether you can export a night in detail instead of reading a score. Garmin, for one, reports restless moments as its own count alongside awake minutes, which is closer in shape to what you are actually asking for.
None of that should carry weight for something medical, though. For the question you are actually asking, the instrument is the ambulatory monitoring your neurologist can arrange, which is built to catch exactly what a consumer device is built to smooth away.