Fitbit envisions smart ring with clinical-grade blood oxygen tracking

Google may one day have a fitness ring that will take on its rivals like Oura. As TechRadar and To be tidied report, the company’s Fitbit brand has applied for a US patent on a smart ring that would track your blood oxygen and pressure using medical-grade sensor technology.

Where many wearable devices use reflected light to measure oxygen in the blood, the Fitbit ring would behave like a clinical pulse oximeter that transmits light through your skin to a photodetector. This should reduce noise and improve the accuracy of blood oxygen measurements while allowing blood pressure and sugar levels to be tracked, among other data.

The appeal of the Fitbit invention, as with other fitness ring technologies, is clear – you can track your health with a wearable device that’s more discreet than a smartwatch or wrist-worn activity tracker. High precision measurements would give the device an edge over competing rings which could compromise quality in the name of size or price.

Read more: The best fitness trackers

Whether or not this becomes a practical reality is less certain. This is only a patent application, not a product roadmap, and there is no guarantee that you will see a Fitbit ring on store shelves. The record shows that Fitbit has seriously explored the concept, but not much more.

The competitive landscape is also hostile. Oura is doing quite well, but other smart ring manufacturers have fallen for the water. Motiv gave up his consumer ring shortly after a digital authentication startup bought it out, and even Amazon ditched the Echo loop rather than expanding sales beyond an invitation-only system. Fitbit and its parent Google may well decide that a fitness ring is too risky, even if the technology is up to the task.