Wearable technology has long promised to reveal more information about our bodies. Now, Ultrahuman is attempting a more ambitious goal: transforming that data into real research. The company has introduced Pulsomics, a research platform that enables smart ring owners to willingly provide organized health studies with their biometric data. It's a significant step beyond releasing sporadic data insights, and it poses important issues about the future of consumer health technology.
“Pulsomics enables any Ultrahuman user to contribute to science, and to the creation of models that can predict everything from how much sleep you need to an individual’s organ function,” says Mohit Kumar, Ultrahuman CEO.
You will be asked for more personal information throughout the registration process than you would normally be asked for when using a wearable. These include "age, sex, height, weight, ethnicity and skin tone information," the latter of which is required to help offset the effects of skin tone on the signals from optical heart rate reader hardware, reports Andrew Williams in Forbes.
“This will be the very first at scale, free-living set of studies where we collect longitudinal wearable data from our users alongside extremely valuable user-provided context to that wearable data like personal lifestyle/medical history, family history, demographics, and sometimes day-level journaling. This would unlock the development of foundational models with labeled population-level data,” says Vinayak Narasimhan, Ultrahuman’s head of science.
One clear concern when sharing health data is how it is used and stored. Ultrahuman claims to have “gold standard” privacy for your information.
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“Data is de-identified before it is used, is never sold, and is never shared with advertisers, employers or insurers. Anything published uses aggregated data across many de-identified participants,” it says.
How does it work?
At launch, Pulsomics offers three studies. Instead of using a general standard, the first examines individual sleep demands, particularly how much sleep a particular person actually needs. VO2 Max is the subject of the second. Participants in the third research must have access to pertinent lab findings since it links wearable data to a panel of current blood tests on glucose metabolism.
There are plans for more research, such as a study on cardiovascular load and a long-term sleep study that would monitor trends.
Owners of the company's home sleep monitor are not currently able to access the Ultrahuman Pulsomics platform, which is only available to Ring Air and Ring Pro smart ring customers.
“The mass adoption of powerful consumer wearables such as the Ultrahuman Ring enables us to train models on real-world data across body types, ethnicities, and cultures, creating more accurate and fairer health features than ever before,” says Ultrahumn CEO Kumar.
Ultrahuman is currently shipping its Ultrahuman Ring Pro to U.S. customers, for $479.
