How Smart Rings Work

The Mota SmartRing has a tiny screen to alert wearers to email, Facebook or Twitter updates.

You're out to dinner with some old college friends. Appetizers are ordered, drinks are served and everyone's having a good time. You're about to launch into a hysterical anecdote about your toddler's bout of diarrhea on an airplane when your pal Becky gets a text.

OK, your story can wait while Becky replies. It'll just take a second. But now Sarah has pulled out her phone and is replying to a friend's tweet. Um, awesome airplane story involving explosive bowel movements waiting to be told ... Too late, Marcy's phone whistles for her attention. Maybe it's a friend's Instagram photo of a pygmy goat or a work email or a calendar update to order more cat food. Whatever it is, it's apparently more important than your unforgettable poop story!

What's Inside a Smart Ring?

Since very few smart rings are actually being sold, it's hard to know exactly what's inside these finger-mounted devices, but we do have some clues.

The backbone of every smart ring is Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth is a close-range wireless technology that allows any two Bluetooth-enabled devices to communicate with each other as far away as 328 feet (100 meters) [source: Bluetooth]. You've probably seen hands-free Bluetooth headsets that let you make cell phone calls without actually holding the phone. Like those headsets, smart rings contain a Bluetooth chip, which is really a small radio that can transmit and receive signals from nearby devices.

The Ringly's ring box doubles as a charger for the smart ring when plugged into a USB outlet.

One of the few smart rings that has moved beyond the prototype stage is Ringly, a fashionable gem of a device whose sole purpose is to deliver notifications from a paired smartphone. A woman wearing Ringly — the initial gemstone designs are marketed to women — can leave her phone in her purse and still feel connected to her most important contacts and social network feeds.

Ringly works by letting the user program the smart ring to deliver a custom notification for specific types of messages and also for specific contacts. Ringly can send notifications using four different vibration patterns and five different colors [source: Ringly].

Like all smart rings, the Ringly works with your smart phone. Its app assigns different colors to different functions.

Here's where things get a little weird. Using a smart ring as a hands-free notification system that pairs with your smartphone seems reasonable enough, but do we really need to remotely control every device in our lives with our pointer finger?

The Japanese company Logbar seems to think so. In 2015, it started selling the Ring ZERO, a device that allows its user to control any number of Bluetooth-enabled devices with a series of finger-based gestures. To turn on the lights, you point at the ceiling and draw a light bulb in the air. When you take a picture with your phone, you can flick your finger upward to upload it to Facebook. Draw a bird in the air to send a Tweet or a music note to play a song.

Lots More Information

Author's Note: How Smart Rings Work

We are living in the golden age of vaporware. Thanks to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, aspiring entrepreneurs can raise staggering amounts of cash with nothing more than a great promo video featuring slick digital renderings of a product that doesn't yet exist. Unlike a venture capitalist, who conducts market research before investing, and expects to see prototypes and works in progress from the company, the typical Kickstarter investor just wants first dibs on a groovy gadget that may never really be a viable product. Researching this article, I found tons of breathless blog posts about smart rings, but few contained any hard facts beyond the companies' own press releases. A visit to the Fin Facebook page shows months between posts and several anxious fans asking for updates and possible release dates, with no replies. I'm all for the democratization of startup funding, but with it comes the risk of more fizzled gadget fantasies.