Size me up

The only way to buy a Motiv ring in Australia is online via the company’s website or through Amazon. As such, when you place your order online, you’ll receive a sizing kit in the mail where you can choose from seven different sizes. Your fingers naturally shrink and swell depending on the weather so Motiv recommends wearing a tester for at least a full day to make sure you get the right fit.

Loading

Getting a good fit is essential to getting good data, and Motiv’s ring sizes are a little different than traditional ring sizes, so it's important to get this part of the process right. Motiv recommends that you steer clear of the little finger or thumb and instead stick to either your index, middle or ring finger.

Once you’ve made a decision on the size, Motiv will send you the ring at the size and colour you nominated within a few days. Motiv also offers the option to do the sizing virtually via the Motiv app, but this feature wasn’t available at the time of testing.

Sleek and discrete

The ring is available in three colours; slate grey, rose gold or silver. All of the colour options are understated and, as the ring is only a little wider than a typical male wedding band, it’s likely to suit everything from sporting to formal attire. Other than a thin LED strip which blinks occasionally when syncing data to the companion smartphone app, it looks like any other fashion ring. It’s highly durable and lightweight thanks to its titanium build, though it is fairly easy to scratch so it will start to show a bit of wear sooner rather than later.

Still, I was impressed with how the ring has held up over a week of fairly harsh treatment. Regardless of whether I was swimming in the ocean, playing basketball or going for a bike ride, the Motiv ring tracked my heart rate, steps taken and calories burned without missing a beat.

I was particularly impressed with how well the Motiv ring performed while lifting weights. I generally take my wedding band off before doing any sort of weight training, but I kept the Motiv ring tucked away under my gym glove throughout and it still managed to record my heart rate much more accurately than my Apple Watch.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the thinner skin on the finger versus the wrist makes the pulse signal up to 50 times stronger, which means a smart ring should provide a more accurate reading of your heart rate than a wrist-based fitness band or smartwatch. Accuracy of the heart rate is important as fitness trackers rely on this vital piece of data to determine how much you’re exerting yourself and in turn the amount of calories you are burning.

The ring's sleep tracking is fairly basic as it tells you how long you slept and the amount of minutes you were restless during the night, but isn’t able to measure individual sleep stages such as REM, light and deep sleep. Sadly there’s no option to disable all radio transmission from the ring, including the Bluetooth connection between the ring and the app, during sleep.

A fitness tracker without the fat

The Motiv ring will monitor your activity in the background so you don’t need to configure anything before starting a particular exercise. To interface with the ring or view the data that it collects, you will need to use the Motiv app on your smartphone. Motiv can automatically identify common activities such as runs and longer walks, but you can also label other activities that might be trickier to detect such as yoga or weights.

The app does a great job of presenting your active minutes for the day. It doesn’t overwhelm you with data and I personally prefer the minimalist approach, but those coming across from something like a Fitbit might bemoan the lack of detailed stats such as the pace or cadence of a run.

Motiv integrates with Apple Health and Google Fit so if you already use something like MyFitnessPal for logging your food intake, you will be able to see whether you’re in a caloric deficit or surplus all from a single interface. The integration with Apple Health and Google Fit is also useful for tracking aspects of your activity that the ring would otherwise be incapable of tracking on its own, such as how many flights of stairs you’ve climbed in a day captured via the barometer on your smartphone.

The ring comes with a proprietary magnetic charger that is small enough to misplace. There’s only one in the box so if you happen to lose it, you will need to buy another charger from Motiv.

Motiv isn’t the only smart ring player on the market, with Finnish upstart Oura promising to offer deeper tracking of your health and sleep albeit for a bit more money. It’s still early days for the smart ring market and we’re bound to see more players crop up in the near future.

With that said, what Motiv is offering at its $279 price point is compelling. If you’re someone who finds wrist-based fitness trackers overbearing or uncomfortable to wear for extended periods and want a more subtle wearable that seamlessly integrates into your everyday life, the Motiv smart ring is well worth considering.