one of these three smart Rings is the new Samsung Galaxy ring and while all these Rings might look the same they're quite different based on my testing of the Galaxy ring it does hold promise mostly for health tracking less so for sports tracking honestly however my feeling from both the Galaxy ring and Galaxy watch launches this year is that the software side of these products is unpolished especially given what was promised in the Galaxy unpacked keynote to show you what I mean let's look at some of the initial testing that I did and let's start off with the heartrate tracking performance during EX exercise these are results for cycling indoors one of the easiest exercises for a device to track to test the performance I'll compare the heart rate measurements of the Galaxy Ring against the polar h10 ECG chest strap which can generally record my heart rate very accurately each dot here in this plot is a single heart rate measurement with long the horizontal AIS the value according to the reference device and on the vertical AIS the value according to the Galaxy Ring The closer the points are to this blue line the better the agreement and the darker black the color the more dots that are and as you can see there's a mediocre agreement at Best yes there's quite a few points close to the blue line but there's also quite a few points here below the Blue Line indicating that many heart rate measurements were quite a bit too low we can also see that the correlation is quite low at 0. 67 correlation cannot be higher than one so this might not seem too bad but honestly a correlation of 0. 67 isn't that good compared to the competition and we can better understand why it is by looking at the individual spinning sessions and here we see the first example example interval spinning session I did where we honestly see a pretty bad agreement between the Galaxy ring in red and the HD chest strap in blue green along the horizontal axis we have the clock time and my heart rate is here along the vertical axis as you can see I did eight intervals each of them leading to a peak in my heart rate and in none of the cases was the peak fully detected and only three times was it partially detected so most of the peaks in my heart rate are missed so that doesn't look very good so far however these kinds of interval sessions tend to be quite hard for heart rate trackers since my heart rate Rises and drops very quickly so I decided to also do a V2 Max test where the power at which I cycle slowly Rises over time so my heart rate shows a much more gradual increase and as you can see here it was able to track my heart rate for most of the beginning of my training but at the peak of my heart rate it still filled I'm not sure what happened here maybe I just held on to the handlebars more tightly but in any case it wasn't able to fully detect my heart rate and for those of you that are curious my V2 Max was about 63 ml per kilogram per minute which is not that far from the V2 max value of 65 that garment predicts I have but more on V2 Max in a future video and I know I look ridiculous and believe me it isn't fun for me either but back to the testing I did another normal interval spinning session with the Galaxy Ring after that and this again shows quite poor performance you can see it missed the increase in my heart rate for three out of seven intervals so it's not quite as bad but still not good enough for me of course it's very important to know how this kind of performance compares to the competition is it better or worse than smart watches and how does it compare to the market leader in smart Rings the aura ring that overview is displayed right here now the correlation value I was talking about before is the metric I'll use for this which is displayed along the horizontal axis in this plot we want that value to be as close to one as possible and on the vertical axis I order to watches from worst to best so the further to the right and the higher devices the better is its correlation with the reference device and here I marked the Galaxy ring in red and as you can see it's really among some of the poorer performers most devices are quite a bit better and you can also see it's really close to the aura ring 3 so the main competitor of the Galaxy ring so that's a first indication there might be some inherent problems with using a ring as a hard R monitor for exercise and if you want to know what devices are good at heart rate tracking for indoor cycling while here I zoom into just the better performing watches and as you can see some of the better performers are Apple watches I know many Samsung people don't like this but this just happens to be the case also Huawei devices are quite good so if you're using Android that would be an option but also things like the pixel Watch 2 and the fibit charge 6 aren't that bad and if you want a device that works on both Android and iOS and that is a decent compromise between Sports and Health tracking I really like the whoop strap 4.
0 I honestly don't think that a ring is a good form factor for tracking your heart rate during exercise the fit and contact with the skin just aren't as consistent as for a watch but it might be that the Galaxy Ring had an easier time tracking my heart rate while cycling outside so let's take a look at those results I've before showing you those I'm hoping that my diligent testing has earned a subscribe from you and it also really helps me get access to devices sooner from manufacturers if you leave a like or a comment but enough self-promotion let's take a look at the performance of the Galaxy ring for outdoor cycling and here we have that overview for outdoor cycling and this also doesn't look too good honestly yes some points are somewhat close to the blue line but there's a big deviation both above and below the Blue Line indicating that sometimes the Galaxy Ring detected a too high heart rate and sometimes a too low low heart rate the correlation is now even lower at 0. 49 so really not that good and if you look at the bike rides themselves again with the reference in blue green and the Galaxy ring in red the Galaxy ring sometimes follows the rough heart rate patterns like for this first cycling session but for other sessions it wasn't quite as good like this one right here here it's basically all over the place where here here and here you can see these weird increases in heart rate that come out of nowhere and also this last example by gri shows some weird dips in heart rate and also some weird PE Le so overall not a very good performance and if we compare the performance of the Galaxy Ring to other devices out there we again see it's one of the poorer performers it's really among the lower devices in this overview and similar to indoor cycling its performance is very close to that of the order ring 3 so again Rings aren't doing that great so if you want Health tracking and sports tracking the Apple watch is quite good but it doesn't have a good data overview another option is the whoop strap which is quite expensive because of the monthly fee but it does work quite well well if you want to go for cheaper options something like the pixel Watch 2 or the FIB charge 6 are also quite good options and like before different wuwei devices are also doing quite well and if you're wondering where the new Galaxy watches are well they're right here and right here so they're really doing quite okay at least for cycling outside we didn't focus on them when we're looking at the performance of cycling indoors but there they weren't doing that great but check out the video up here if you're interested in my initial testing now the results you just looked at were based on just three bike rides and I actually recorded five but for some reason my heart rate wasn't recorded for the first two you have to start the exercises from the health app and it did nothing different the first two times but for some reason it just didn't work for those this was one of the first indications to me that the integration of the new Samsung devices in the health app still wasn't ideal but more on that later let's first talk about sleep and sleep stage tracking and since we just also looked at heart rate tracking can the Galaxy Ring track your heart rate accurately while you sleep well I tested that last night and luckily this did a lot better you can see right here that the Galaxy ring in red and the reference in blue green track very similar heart rate so that looks very good to me and we can also make a correlation plot similar to before where we plot the correlation of the heart rate according to the reference versus that of the Galaxy ring and we see a decent correlation here most points are on or at least close to the Blue Line though a little bit below it but overall the correlation at 0.
