For most people, the smart home is about convenience: lights that turn on automatically, thermostats that learn schedules, and voice assistants that respond to simple commands.
But over the last couple of years, a few companies have been experimenting with something different: homes that respond not just to routines and schedules, but to signals from the human body.
One such company is Ultrahuman, which launched in 2019 with an activity tracking app (and began weaving in metabolic tracking with its blood sugar monitoring service in 2021). This week, the company announced Jade, a biointelligence monitoring system that it says can interpret health data across its devices and services. The launch came alongside the company’s new Ring PRO smart ring, which extends battery life to roughly 15 days and adds redesigned sensing hardware.
Taken together with this week’s announcement and the 2024 launch of Ultrahuman Home, a device that combines environmental wellness and personal health monitoring, and you can begin to see the company’s larger strategy of combining wearable sensors, laboratory biomarkers, and environmental monitoring into a continuous feedback loop around health.
Of course, this concept isn’t entirely new. Sleep technology companies, wearable makers, and smart home platforms have been experimenting with similar ideas for years. What Ultrahuman is attempting is to connect those threads into a single system. At the center of the company’s personal wellness monitoring strategy is its smart ring, which tracks sleep, heart rate, movement, and recovery. The newly announced Ring PRO adds longer battery life and updated sensors designed to improve signal quality during sleep.
The company also offers metabolic monitoring through continuous glucose sensors, along with a blood testing service called Blood Vision that analyzes more than 100 biomarkers related to metabolic health, inflammation, hormones, and cardiovascular risk.
“Traditional diagnostics offer a moment-in-time snapshot,” Kumar said last year. “Blood Vision transforms this into a longitudinal, predictive model of your health.”
The idea is to correlate slow-moving lab markers, such as ApoB cholesterol or fasting insulin, with daily behavioral signals, such as sleep, activity, and glucose patterns.
And then there’s the company’s smart home-meets-wellness platform, Ultrahuman Home. The system tracks factors such as air quality, light levels, temperature, humidity, and noise. Using spatial audio detection, it can also identify snoring, coughing, and other nighttime respiratory signals. Environmental data is combined with physiological data from the ring via what the company calls UltraSync, which seeks to identify correlations between sleep stages and conditions such as room temperature or CO₂ levels.
Last fall, the company announced that by the end of 2025, the Home would begin controlling connected devices in the smart home—adjusting lighting, temperature, or air purification in response to environmental cues that affect sleep.
The idea of linking health signals with the smart home isn’t completely new. In 2021, Google introduced sleep sensing on the Nest Hub, using radar technology to detect breathing patterns and sleep disturbances without requiring a wearable. Withings’ Sleep Analyzer can trigger smart home automations through IFTTT integrations. Meanwhile, companies like Eight Sleep have built systems that automatically adjust bed temperature throughout the night based on biometric signals. And then there’s the Sugar Pixel, which connects to a Dexcom blood sugar monitor to display glucose readings on what looks like an old-school alarm clock.
Missing from this conversation, of course, is Apple, which arguably has the pieces to bring many of these elements together through HealthKit, the Apple Watch platform, and its long-percolating HomeKit ecosystem. While all indications are that Apple continues to invest in the smart home – and may be preparing to launch a smart home hub – it remains unclear whether the company plans to tie wellness or activity data into home automation.
For its part, Ultrahuman has seen relatively strong growth in its wearables business, though it faced a setback last year after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in favor of Oura in a patent dispute, temporarily blocking Ultrahuman from importing new ring inventory into the country. The company responded by filing its own patent infringement claim against Oura, which is still pending.
Ultimately, whether Ultrahuman succeeds may depend less on the hardware itself than on whether consumers are interested in having their homes respond to their biology. In an era in which Silicon Valley longevity advocates increasingly focus on the role home environments play in long-term health, it may only be a matter of time before more companies attempt to connect the building blocks, such as wearables, biomarker tracking, and home automation, to the smart home to transform it into a health-monitoring system.
