Why Garmin Will Not Make a Smart Ring

Garmin is a market leader in fitness tech, renowned for its feature-packed smartwatches. The company continues to evolve and innovate across multiple areas. As competitors like RingConn, Ultrahuman, and Samsung venture into the realm of smart rings, the question remains: Why hasn’t Garmin followed suit?

At Garmin’s Health Summit in Prague (September 2024), Joe Schrick, Vice President of Fitness, and Scott Burgett, Senior Director of Health Engineering, addressed this question in media interviews, as detailed in Wareable’s Substack. The opinions and take-outs are different to those here.

The reasoning boils down to two key factors: data accuracy and user experience.

From Giant Leaps to Incremental Gains

“It’s easy to raise a ‘D’ grade to an ‘A,’ but getting from an ‘A’ to an ‘A+’ is much harder,” Schrick explains. “The first devices weren’t great, but we quickly rose to the top. Making incremental improvements—gaining just a few more percentage points in accuracy—is just as challenging as the giant leaps we made before.”

In other words, Garmin has already addressed the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of innovation. Today, piecemeal improvements require as much effort as earlier breakthroughs. It’s not easy to improve.

In 2015, we launched our first in-house PPG sensor. We’re now on Gen 5 and you can see how often we update that throughout the year…It’s one of our constant initiatives. We continue to innovate in our sensor technology. [Burgett]

Innovation Over Shortcuts

The smartwatch market has grown significantly in recent years, and Garmin has remained at the forefront through a combination of astute corporate acquisitions and significant investment in research & development. “We’re aware of what’s happening in the patent world, but we’re focused on innovation,” Schrick emphasizes. He stresses the importance of creating unique and genuinely useful features and avoiding the shortcuts other companies might take. “Some companies copy; Garmin doesn’t. We’re committed to developing new features in original ways.”

More: Garmin Track Feature (first on Coros)

This focus on innovation, rather than shortcuts, informs Garmin’s decision not to enter the Smart Ring market. It’s not that Garmin doesn’t recognize the trend or the potential profits—instead, the question is whether a smart ring aligns with its commitment to accuracy and reliability.

The Power of Wrist-Based Tech

Schrick further argues that wrist-based devices provide superior data quality. He explains that Garmin is “pushing physics at this point,” particularly improving the signal-to-noise ratio. This ratio is crucial for extracting valid biometric data amidst the noise created by movement, skin conditions, and other variables in wearables.

It’s so important that you can put on a wearable and leave it on for seven days…Every time you take it off, there’s a chance you might not put it back on…We focus on battery life because it’s a unique selling point that none of our competitors really can touch. [Burgett]

“The data fidelity on the wrist is superior to that of a ring because we can pack more power, LEDs, sensors, and battery life into a watch,” Schrick claims. While smart rings may offer comfort and ease of use, they sacrifice precision and depth of data.

Garmin’s Director of Physiological Research, Scott Burgett, agrees: “In low-motion states, we can achieve just as good—if not better—signal-to-noise ratios on the wrist as on the finger, thanks to more LEDs and a larger power budget.” This higher data quality is essential for Garmin and its athlete customers, who prioritize precise tracking.

The Compromise of a Smart Ring

While smart rings are often praised for their comfort and minimalist design, Schrick is sceptical about their effectiveness for all-day activity tracking and performance metrics. “The ring’s advantage is comfort, but that’s where it ends. Tracking your activity all day with a ring can be a significant compromise, whereas a watch offers more reliable data and performance,” he asserts.

Burgett also highlights the balance Garmin must strike between the sophistication of its devices and the growing desire for smaller, more compact wearables. One way Garmin achieves this balance is by avoiding heavily regulated product categories that could slow the pace of innovation. “Non-regulated devices are cheaper, faster, and more agile,” Burgett admits. Still, he suggests that Garmin prefers the more challenging but ultimately rewarding path of creating wearables that excel in regulated environments where precision is critical and mandated.

Why Garmin Won’t Chase the Ring

So, why won’t Garmin make a smart ring?

The company seems unwilling to compromise its dedication to data accuracy and precision for the sake of the form factor.

Final Thoughts

Smart rings have low unit profitability, exacerbated for Garmin due to the wholly new business processes required for their production. However, Garmin’s key long-term target demographics necessitate the ring-based form.

Ultimately, while it’s clear that watches offer more power and sensor capabilities than rings, wrist-worn devices are subject to complex motion artefacts that affect accuracy. Ring manufacturers might argue that finger-based devices benefit from the higher blood velocity in the fingers, enhancing accuracy. Either way, in 2024, there is no perfect technical solution.

Millions of smart rings have already been sold—Oura reached its one-millionth sale in 2022 and is now thought to have an annual turnover approaching $500 million—demonstrating a significant consumer preference for the ring format. Ignoring this trend may seem risky for any health company. However, Garmin’s focus on adventure and activity tracking requires higher accuracy, which their customers value, especially during extended periods of movement where wrist-based devices still provide more reliable data.

As Garmin moves further into wellness and smart technology markets, where comfort may take precedence over accuracy, the demand for smart rings is expected to grow significantly, as CCS Insights and others predicted. The wellness and smart markets are fiercely competitive ones, and Garmin must maintain market share to survive.

I think Garmin is making a mistake by not catering to this segment. Other reasons for their hesitation might include the costly new production processes, the need for more miniaturized technology, high assembly costs, lower margins, sizing complexities, and different sales and marketing channels.