This is a snippet from our extended interview with Garmin’s Vice President of Fitness, Joe Schrick, and Senior Director of Health Engineering, Scott Burgett.
Read the full interview on PULSE by Wareable.
Despite the emergence of smart rings in the past couple of years, Garmin says the best form factor for health tracking remains the watch.
In an interview at the 6th annual Garmin Health Summit in Prague – where the company gathers its partners in health research, insurance, employee wellness, and fitness – that was the word of two key company executives.
“The fidelity of the data on the wrist is going to be better [than a ring] because you have more power, you have more LEDs, you have more sensors, and you have more battery life,” Joe Schrick, Garmin’s VP of Fitness, told us.
“The battery isn’t ever going to be bigger on a ring, even if it gets more efficient. So, yes, the advantage of the ring is the comfort of it. But that’s probably where I’d stop.
“If you look at your data all day from a ring, or try and track your activity, it’s a massive compromise and you might take a step back in some cases. But in other cases, you may take leaps forward, like in comfort.”
It’s a view in contrast to the opinions shared by smart ring companies we’ve spoken to over the past year, who often tout features like pulse wave velocity as more accurate from the finger due to a ring’s proximity to the radial artery.
Scott Burgett, Garmin’s Senior Director of Health Engineering, added to Schrick’s insight into the watch’s health monitoring strengths.
“If you wanna talk about signal-to-noise ratio and the fidelity of the PPG waveform; I can get just as good on the wrist as I can on the finger in a low-motion state.
“Maybe even better, because I can have more LEDs. I have a bigger power budget.”
With health and sleep tracking generally being the focus areas for smart rings (given that the sensor struggles with excessive hand movement during exercise), it’s certainly interesting to hear the perspective from a company that doesn’t appear in any way tempted to produce a smart ring of its own.
Yet, the battle between smart rings and watches as health tracking is something we’re intrigued to see develop in the coming years.
After all, the efficiency of smart ring batteries – not to mention the miniaturization of sensors – is only going to improve in the next decade, and could mean the benefits of the watch become negligible for plenty of users.
Watch this space.
