Move over, Oura. A new smart ring grabbed our admiration at CES 2024 this year, the world’s largest consumer tech show. Evie, a brand-new health tracking ring from Movano Health, was designed with women’s health in mind.
Evie automatically tracks your sleep, heart rate, blood oxygen levels and steps. You can manually add details about your workouts and log your energy levels and period. The way it interprets data is meant to bring the results together in a more individualized way.
To understand how it works, I put it through the ultimate tech-reporter test: I wore it while covering CES. The tech show is massive, so my days were filled with running across multiple conference centers and getting in a crazy amount of steps. Then there’s all the handshaking, which also means a lot of hand-cleaning. Plus, I flew to Las Vegas from the East Coast, so it has had full access to my terrible hotel room sleep (or lack thereof).
Since Evie’s data and results are meant to apply to wearers as individuals, a bad day for me looks different than a bad day for you. It tracks trends over time to help you reach better health goals, and that also can mean you have to do things like log your periods or tell the app when you’re not feeling well, and it can help you see patterns in your activity and then make suggestions.
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I was set up with a demo Evie on the show floor, and pairing with my phone was extremely fast. I was genuinely impressed at first sight. It looks like real jewelry with a nice little arrow design that sort of looks like a K. The only way you know it’s tech is because sometimes there is a little blinking light from the biometric sensors on the inside of the band.
I’m not using Evie long enough to get all that data and feedback into the app. Using it during CES was a good test of a chunk of its promised capabilities. A big one is step counting; there’s a lot of walking at CES. Evie was tracking me at 18,000 steps on the opening day of the show, so it certainly wasn’t missing a count. Interestingly, the number was 3,000 steps more than what my Apple Watch recorded.
It’s hard to measure here just how accurate the ring is, but it is keeping up with my walking. Also, it feels really comfortable. I got it sized before the show and wearing it doesn’t bother me at all. I can wear it on any finger and get the same reading, should I need to switch it for any reason.
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At CES there are so many people you meet that it’s easy to get sick, so I’m always using hand sanitizer and washing my hands. Evie held up perfectly fine; it doesn’t feel any different than when you have other rings on, and I wasn’t fidgeting with it to dry it or anything. Frankly, there’s no time for that here, so it was nice that it wasn’t an issue.
Sleep tracking is interesting. My sleep on this trip was just terrible. With the time change, I kept waking up at odd hours and the ring tracked all those moments through the night. I wear an Apple Watch, but I don’t normally track my sleep with it because I always get stuck in the habit of charging the watch while I sleep.
The battery life of Evie, the company said, should last several days before it needs a charge, so you can just wear it and not think about it. I charged it at the beginning of the show and three days later, it was at 59%. Charging is fast and simple: you pop it in a case like you would a pair of earbuds, and it snaps in magnetically.
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One of my favorite parts of using Evie is how unobtrusive it is. I like how you can just track your health with nothing to think about. There’s no screen to ping you, just data when you want to see it inside the app.
On the paired app, you’ll get a personalized daily summary of based on activity, steps, calories, sleep and mood. What’s more, Movano said in a press release that its ring has sensors that are optimized for vital sign measurements on women’s fingers, which can be different in size and blood flow than men’s, and fluctuate based on hormonal factors.
The ring costs $269, and unlike Oura, there’s no additional membership or service fee. I would need to live with it longer for a full review but for now, Evie held up through the tech-journalist gauntlet of CES. Plus, it looks cute.
Evie can be ordered now in three finishes (silver, gold and rose gold) and is expected to start shipping later this month. The ring and paired mobile app are compatible with only iOS at the moment, although the company has plans to support Android in the near future.
For more from CES, here are the biggest themes of CES 2024 and the weirdest gadgets we found at the show.
CNET Wellness Writer Jessica Rendall contributed to this story.
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