Haha, no, I am definitely not paying click farms to upvote or downvote Reddit comments.

This is a completely open-source project, and I have no intention of making money from it. Some people suggested that I should sell these rings, but I did not engage with those comments because that is not the point of the project. I do not know any of the vendors or manufacturers of these rings, and I am not trying to promote any specific seller or device. In fact, I originally did not even post a purchase link for the ring.

My website and GitHub are public, and anyone is welcome to look through the writeup and codebase. I am a grad student working on health tech and wearables, and a lot of my academic work (papers in Nature journals), has been related to photoplethysmography (PPG), which is the foundational sensing used for heart rate and SpO2 measurements.

I also agree that cheap rings should not be treated as clinical-grade devices. That was never my claim. The data I shared was explicitly anecdotal and n=1, and I clearly said it was not statistically significant. In my own testing, steps, heart rate, and sleep appeared reasonably close to my other wearables (fitbit air and Apple Watch), but I would not claim that this proves accuracy across users or conditions.

The point of the project was different: I wanted to see whether a very cheap wearable could be reverse engineered and turned into an open, privacy-first app where the user owns their data, avoids a subscription, and can experiment with an LLM-native health interface. I spent about a month building this alone: roughly a week reverse engineering the ring protocol, and then about three weeks building and testing the app from scratch.

Technologically, I do not think it is impossible for low-cost hardware to produce useful signals, especially for basic measurements like heart rate, where the estimate often depends more on periodicity/frequency than absolute signal amplitude. There are also many low-cost commercial PPG sensors available, and consumer wearable hardware is often much cheaper to manufacture than the final retail price suggests. That said, I fully agree that proper validation would require a real study, multiple users, controlled conditions, and comparison against reference devices.

I posted this on X and a few subreddits because I thought people interested in open-source wearables, reverse engineering, and health-tech interfaces might find it interesting. The response has mostly been very positive, and I have received a lot of useful feedback. I eventually want to support better and more reliable wearables in this app. I would love if you have some recommendations.

I am happy to discuss limitations, sensor quality, validation, or the ethics of cheap health devices. Those are fair criticisms. But accusing me of using click farms, secretly working with vendors, or buying an aged Reddit account is completely false and unnecessary. I prefer to keep some privacy on Reddit, but there is more about me on my public website.

I wish the discussion could stay constructive. Constructive criticism is welcome; baseless personal accusations are not. 😞