Name: Amazfit Helio review
Brand: Amazfit

The Amazfit Helio is a good-looking smart ring that's too light on features and insights to justify its price

The Amazfit Helio is a well made smart ring that plugs into Zepp Health's established ecosystem – but its small feature set doesn't feel worthy of its price tag. It populates a narrow selection of daily readiness and recovery features, but compared to the slick presentation of Ultrahuman, it feels undercooked. Sleep tracking data also feels wide of the mark, and as a health device, there are question marks. Amazfit got the build right, but its algorithms and analysis need an overhaul.

Pros

Sleek, quality build
Good battery life
Scratch resistant

Cons

Only two sizes at launch
Over estimates sleep wildly
Static and unintuitive readiness scores

The Amazfit Helio Ring was announced back at CES 2024, but we’ve been living with it for over a month for a full review.

Smart rings are the hottest property in wearables right now, with the incumbent superpower Oura now joined by Samsung – and excellent alternatives such as Ultrahuman and RingConn.

Best smart rings from our reviews

The Amazfit Helio is an interesting addition, given Zepp Health’s established status as a health tech platform. Smart ring startups usually have the issue of making the hardware and the software experience, which is challenging. Amazfit at least has the latter already.

It’s US only for now, and comes with a hefty $299 price tag.

And it’s done a great job with the hardware too. But does the Amazfit Helio stand up as a health and wellness device? We’ve worn it extensively to find out.

Design

In terms of pure design, the Helio might be my favorite smart ring so far. It’s lightweight and svelte, with gentle rounded edges, muted colorways, and a textured finish which doesn’t look out of place.

There’s one thing to note – at launch Amazfit is only offering Helio in US10 and US12 sizes – which is extremely limiting. Luckily, I take a US10 size, but the fit is very snug. I have to wet my finger to remove it, and it usually leaves a white band as it’s just slightly too tight.

It’s also resistant to scratches, thanks to the titanium alloy. I’ve worn Helio for the best part of two months, and it’s not been marked.

It weighs 3.8g, which isn’t the lightest smart ring out there, but it’s extremely comfortable to wear. At 2.66mm thick, it’s about standard, compared to Oura and Ultrahuman.

It’s 10ATM water resistant and charges on a puck, just like Oura. It works with Android and iOS devices, and pairs via the Zepp Health app.

Features

The Amazfit Helio is a lovely design, albeit with an extremely limited array of sizes at the time of writing. But when it comes to features – it feels as if Amazfit has forgotten to make it do anything.

Zepp Health is pitching the Helio as a companion device for its smartwatches, to get added and more in-depth health metrics.

As what is essentially a budget fitness/smartwatch brand, it feels unlikely that users would splurge an extra $299 for a companion to its existing wearables – but that’s just my take.

That means that Zepp Health expects users to sleep with the Helio, before donning a smartwatch for the day.

So the main features of the Amazfit Helio are:

Activity tracking: Helio will populate Zepp Health with step data, PAI (personal activity index) scores from walking, as well as all-day heart rate. However, there is no provision for workout tracking. That’s not a bad thing, as smart ring workout data is usually terrible – but if you wear the ring for a run, that data won’t really show on the device.

We do like PAI as a metric, which rates your physical activity over the last 7 days out of 100. It’s a good way of tracking your exertion, but it’s never been particularly motivating, and we feel it’s quite opaque.

It will update the PAI score with heart rate for that session, but a deeper look showed it wasn’t that accurate. We got around 49 PAI for a 10K run, which is fine. But the max HR for the session recorded by Helio was 149, while data from the run showed the average HR was 165. So you’re not getting the full credit for your workouts.

Sleep tracking: A core of any wearable experience, the sleep tracking via Helio isn’t that much different from its smartwatch devices.

We’ll go in-depth on Amazfit’s sleep tracking, but you get duration, stages, heart rate, and sleep breathing quality – however, the breathing rate isn’t shown.

Stress monitoring: Helio will populate Amazfit’s standard sleep tracking, just as its smartwatches will. It shows the high and low score out of 100 for the day, and a single average number. We didn’t find it too useful in correlating our stress, although the trend views can be revealing if you see the numbers creep up. There’s no specific sleep stress metric – which is a shame.

Readiness and recovery score: A staple of modern wearables, Amazfit’s recovery score is based on its HRV. And actually, it does this really well. HR scores calculated at night were generally locked onto Whoop – so you’re getting extremely accurate insights. It offers this as a score out of 100.

It also has a number of sub data points including sleep HRV, resting HR, body temperature, and physical/mental recovery.

What I did find lacking was sensitivity here, and I seemed to get between 80-85 recovery scores on most days – worryingly even when I was really ill with Covid.

In fact, Zepp Health gave me a Readiness score of 74/100 when Whoop gave me 1/100 – which is actually worthy of a special fail badge. See the screenshot above and compare sleep

The slight mitigation for Zepp was that I’d only been wearing Helio for a couple of days, so it might not have worked out that the stats it was reading were extremely abnormal. However, I’ve used Zepp Health on and off for years, so if that’s the case, it’s a poor showing for the platform if it can’t work out that I’m riddled with a virus.

And this underlines my overall point that while Helio is a nice ring to wear and gets some aspects of the experience right, it’s actually far too basic for a wearable at a $299 price point.

AI insights: Amazfit’s Aura AI will offer insights into your data, although this is the element that’s behind a $29.99 paywall. The AI can be useful in highlighting changes in your stats, although the chat that ensues with the AI has a level of mundanity that makes it less appealing to use.

You can see a screenshot below, where the AI picks up on the fact that my heart rate didn’t drop as usual and something might be up. The chat was so unhelpful it needn’t have taken place.

These are all calculated at night, and then displayed at the top of the Zepp Health app. If you are already using a Zepp health smartwatch, the app will sift through both sets of data and blend them together for one single view of health.

Biometric Accuracy

In many respects, the Helio’s accuracy of its sensors stood up to our checks.

Resting heart rate during sleep was in line with our personal baselines, and usually within 1-2bpm of Whoop. Different devices will calculate resting heart rate differently, but there were no horror shows in the data. It was the presentation of that data that we found lacking.

Likewise, we found heart rate variability to also be on point with Whoop, which is known for its HRV tracking prowess. Most nights showed close or identical heart rate variability metrics.

While Helio doesn’t track heart rate during exercise, we found it to underestimate HR during runs. However, it’s not usual to see smart rings struggle with the motion and external sensor noise of workouts.

Sleep Tracking

The problem with Amazfit and Helio is that its sleep tracking isn’t actually that great – and when it forms the basis for a lot of the assumptions about your health, it’s hard to get behind it as a platform.

I found sleep duration would often be around an hour more than Whoop or Oura.

On my best sleep of my testing – 8 June – Amazfit reported 8 hours of sleep and awarded me a sleep score of 95/100. Whoop on the same night tracked just 6.5 hours of sleep and above-average restlessness.

The only way to accurately compare sleep is in a lab – but having used Helio over the weeks it was clear that it regularly overestimated sleep and wakeups.

Sleep stages were also tracked, but like most wearables, there’s little evidence these are accurately tracked and are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

I like the sleep breathing quality monitor, which needs to be turned on manually. This tracks disturbances that could be a sign of sleep apnea.

The sleep tracking would usually flag me for poor mental recovery. While it’s nice to have something to work on, there’s little information given on how to improve this – as it would usually show that I had recommended amounts of deep, light, and REM sleep. Reading the explanation, it seems to point to sleep duration, but it was shown even when it reported 7.5 hours of sleep. It’s not wrong, I am mentally exhausted from having young kids, but the presentation felt confusing.