Amazfit Helio Ring review: A surprisingly accurate fitness tracker on your finger
Amazfit Helio Ring
Pros
- Accurate heart rate tracking during exercise
- Comfortable and stylish design
- Long battery life
- Comprehensive health and fitness tracking
- Seamless app integration
Cons
- Recovery Score needs improvement
- Fiddly charging dock
- Some features require a subscription
Smart rings have always intrigued me, promising a discreet and comfortable way to track health and fitness metrics without the bulk of a traditional smartwatch. Over the past few years I have tested a variety of options, eager to find one that strikes the perfect balance between functionality, design, and price.
Now, a major player in the smartwatch world has entered the smart ring arena. Zepp Health, known for its popular line of Amazfit smartwatches, has released the $299 Helio Ring, its first foray in this space. As a longtime fan of the company’s products, I was eager to test out the product.
Zepp Health promises that the Helio will offer insights that can help users improve their health habits by tracking a variety of metrics including heart rate, blood oxygen, sleep patterns, and activity. And I must say, it doesn’t disappoint.
Here is my review after about two weeks of testing, and let me just say that its exercise tracking features are what really set this ring apart. Let’s dive straight in.
View Amazfit Helio Ring on the Amazfit website.
Amazfit Helio Ring review: Design, hardware
Look & feel
As far as looks, the Amazfit Helio Ring is not too different from other offerings in the smart ring space. The device is made from skin-friendly titanium alloy and is very lightweight, coming in at less than 4 grams. Its super slim profile is designed for all-day comfort, including sleep. The edges are smooth and rounded, ensuring a comfortable fit that doesn’t dig into my skin or catch on clothing.
I’ve been wearing the Helio on the index finger of my left hand, switching it to the opposite hand for workouts where a slightly tighter fit is preferred, and I’ve found it to be very comfortable. You can choose from 7 different sizes, although at the time of writing this review not all of them are available. Size 10 turned out to be a great fit for me.
Despite its sleek design, the Helio Ring feels durable and well-constructed. The titanium alloy has proven to be quite resilient, maintaining its polished look even with the inevitable bumps and scrapes that come with everyday wear. After several weeks of constant wear, I have yet to see a single scratch or any other imperfection.
The Helio’s design is elegantly minimalist. There are no buttons or LED lights, just a sleek ring. This understated look makes it suitable for both casual and formal occasions. In fact, most people wouldn’t suspect that this seemingly traditional ring conceals high-tech smarts within.
Zepp Health boasts that the Helio is water-resistant up to 10 ATM, meaning it can withstand depths of up to 100 meters. While I haven’t tested it in such extreme conditions, I have worn it while showering and swimming with no issues.
Overall, the Amazfit Helio Ring’s feels really well made. Its design is unassuming and functional, prioritizing comfort and durability over flashy aesthetics. It’s a no-nonsense smart ring as far as looks – that delivers on its promise of discreet, all-day wearability.
Under the Hood
At its core, the Amazfit Helio Ring utilizes the BioTracker PPG heart rate sensor, a cutting-edge technology that combines dual-color LEDs and photodiodes to precisely monitor your heart rate and blood oxygen saturation levels throughout the day and night. This data is essential for understanding your cardiovascular health and overall fitness.
But the Helio doesn’t stop there. It also incorporates a temperature sensor to continuously monitor your skin temperature, providing valuable insights into your overall well-being and potentially alerting you to early signs of illness. Additionally,an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor measures subtle changes in your skin’s electrical conductance, offering a window into your stress levels and emotional state. The EDA sensor is not something you will find in most other smart ring offerings.
Beyond that, the Helio Ring boasts a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope to track your movements and activity levels with precision. There is no Wi-Fi connectivity. Instead, the ring connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), allowing you to sync your data, receive notifications and customize your settings through the Zepp app.
A week of battery life
The Amazfit Helio Ring is equipped with a battery designed to last up to 5 days with typical use. This impressive battery life ensures that you can wear the ring continuously, day and night, without worrying about frequent charging interruptions. The exact battery capacity varies slightly depending on the ring size, with 18.5 mAh for Size 10 and 20.5 mAh for Size 12.
One thing to note is that there are various options you can customise that will effect the longevity between charges. For example, you can choose how frequently the ring will take a reading of your heart rate. For the purposes of this review, I chose all the bells and whistles and found that despite that I could easily get 3 days of battery life.
Also, it is not very power hungry when tracking exercise. With smartphone GPS switched on, I ran a half-marathon with the ring. Going in, the device was close to 100% battery capacity. At the end it was just below 85%. Not bad. If you were to track a marathon with the ring, you would still have more than half of battery capacity left.
Charging the Amazfit Helio Ring is done via the charging dock. When placing the ring it does get a bit fiddly as you need to align it the correct way. Which is a bit annoying. A single LED will light up when the ring is correctly positioned. Charging from zero to full, it takes approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Amazfit Helio Ring review: Features
Using the ring
In terms of functionality, the Amazfit Helio Ring operates much like other smart rings I’ve tested. After the initial pairing with the iOS or Android Zepp app, the ring functions independently, collecting data without the need for a constant phone connection.
Syncing the ring to the app to view your data has been consistently seamless, unlike some other rings I’ve used where connectivity issues occasionally required Bluetooth toggling or even phone restarts. The Helio Ring’s reliable syncing and connection is a definite plus.
The Zepp app is the same one used for Amazfit watches, and while the Helio Ring can be paired with an Amazfit watch for a more comprehensive data set, it functions perfectly fine as a standalone device. I tested it without a paired watch and found no limitations in its functionality.
While wearing the ring, you’ll notice a small notch on the outer surface. This is a subtle indicator to help you orient the ring correctly on your finger, with the notch facing towards your palm. While I didn’t always strictly adhere to this during normal wear, I did try and make an effort to position the ring correctly during exercise tracking for optimal data collection.
The app
The Zepp app itself is clean, intuitive, and easy to navigate. Four main tabs along the bottom—Home, Sleep, Workout,and Profile—organize your data and settings.
The Home tab acts as your dashboard, displaying your most important stats in customizable tiles. At the top, you’ll find a concise overview of your recovery stats, including a readiness score, Sleep Score, Sleep RHR, Sleep HRV, and an estimate of your Full Recovery time, offering a quick snapshot of your overall state.
While the ring begins tracking metrics immediately, some data points, such as HRV baseline and temperature, take about a week to fully calibrate. Once established, your daily overnight values are compared against these baselines.
The ring also tracks steps,stress, blood oxygen, and your PAI score, a personalized metric based on your heart rate data that measures your overall physical activity and its impact on your health. So plenty of data to sink your teeth into.
The Sleep tab delves deeper into your sleep patterns, comparing your Sleep Score to other users and providing a Daily Insight for easy understanding. The app also tracks your sleep regularity, crucial for maintaining your circadian rhythm, as well as sleep stages, awake time, and naps.
Additionally, the Sleep page offers information on your Sleep Breathing Quality, currently in beta, which tracks for suspected Hypopnea (abnormally shallow or slow breathing during sleep). This level of detail is not commonly found in most smart rings.
Having said that, I did find a negative. The Recovery Metric seem to be work in progress. I found that its not responsive enough to daily changes. Furthermore, it consists of Physical Recovery and Mental Recovery which makes it a bit confusing. And sometimes the metric dished out non-sensical information. For example, the day after running half a marathon, it told me that my Readiness Score, at 89, was in the optimal range, but at the same time it told me that my full Recovery Time is 47 hours. So which of these two should I listen to?
While the majority of data in the Zepp app is freely accessible, certain features reside behind a paywall. These include a personalized report generated from seven days of sleep data, assessing Sleep Apnea Risk, Insomnia, Sleepiness, and Restless Leg Syndrome. Zepp Aura, a subscription service offering additional insights and features, is also available for around $3 per month with a 14-day free trial. However, even without the premium subscription, the free version of the Zepp app provides more than enough information for the average user.
As far as accuracy of metrics I found this to be pretty good. Steps count, sleep tracking, blood oxygen, stress were all where I expected them to be.
As far as resting heart rate and heart rate variability, you can see below the 10 day average tracking values for Helio Ring, Whoop and Garmin Forerunner 955. Not that much of a difference. I also found the day to day up and down moves to be broadly similar.
Average | Helio Ring | Whoop | Garmin |
Resting heart rate | 52 bpm | 53 bpm | 49 bpm |
Heart rate variability | 30 ms | 27 ms | 39 ms |
Sleep (length per night) | 444 min | 407 min | 421 min |
Amazfit Helio Ring review: A smart ring capable of tracking heart rate during exercise?
As hinted in the introduction, the highlight of the ring for me was its heart rate tracking during exercise. I have tested a few smart rings over the years and while they are good at recovery and sleep tracking, none of them did a good job when it comes to tracking heart rate during exercise. The Amazfit Helio is the exception.
I tested it on 6 different runs, including most recently a half marathon. I’ll use that last run as an example – but the results are very representative of my other runs.
The ring itself does not have a GPS chip and you need to start the exercise from the app. Your choice is between running, walking and cycling. Then you can put the phone in your pocket or keep an eye on your real-time stats on the phone display. You can also enable the tracking to pause automatically and there are some other settings such as Pace alert, Metronome and High Heart rate alerts. All of these will come from the phone rather than the ring.
Zepp Health suggests that the notch on the ring should be at the lower end of your finger. I must admit that for certain runs I forgot to ensure that. But it didn’t make much of a difference – the ring was consistently good at tracking my heart rate.
For example, for the most recent half marathon run, RingConn estimated my average heart rate at 143 bpm and my maximum heart rate at 162 bpm. For the same run, the Garmin Forerunner 955 pegged me at 144 bpm and 163 bpm respectively. This accuracy of heart rate tracking during exercise was consistently replicated in my other runs. You can check out sum of them on this link.
Plus, there are no drops or gaps in the heart rate data as demonstrated via the charts below. The drops that are there are because I stopped to drink water on a couple of occasions.
Beyond that, you get a bunch of other stats. This includes pace information, calories, heart rate zones, altitude, gradient distribution, cadence, stride length, Training Effect, Recovery Time , EPOC Training Load and Vo2Max. Pretty impressive considering this is a tiny fitness device sitting on your finger.
So I was quite satisfied with the tracking accuracy for exercise. The one exception, as mentioned, is Recovery Time. Which doesn’t seem very reflective of your true state. Hopefully, this will be fixed with one of the forthcoming firmware updates.
Amazfit Helio Ring review: The bottom line
The Amazfit Helio Ring is a promising newcomer to the smart ring market. While not without its flaws, such as the occasionally inconsistent Recovery Score, the Helio Ring excels in several key areas. Its comfortable and stylish design, coupled with its accurate heart rate tracking during exercise, make it a compelling choice for fitness lovers.
The comprehensive health and fitness tracking, seamless app integration, and impressive battery life further solidify its position as a worthy contender among other smart rings. While the premium features behind the Zepp Aura paywall might not be essential for everyone, the free version of the app still offers a wealth of valuable insights.
If you’re seeking a reliable and stylish smart ring with a strong focus on fitness tracking, the $299 Amazfit Helio Ring is a worthwhile option to consider. Its performance, especially in heart rate monitoring during workouts, makes it a valuable tool for anyone looking to optimize their training and overall well-being.
View Amazfit Helio Ring on the Amazfit website.
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Nice comprehensive article