Will we see a Garmin smart ring in 2026?

Is Garmin finally gearing up to launch a smart ring? Not quite. While the rest of the industry scrambles to put sensors on your finger, Garmin is steering well clear of the trend, choosing instead to invest in form factors that sidestep legal landmines and preserve their gold standard for data accuracy. Here’s why that’s unlikely to change in 2026

Garmin is staying away from smart rings

Despite growing consumer interest, Garmin has not made any moves toward launching a smart ring. There are no product leaks, no prototypes and crucially, no US patents covering ring-based hardware or designs. In fact unlike Apple and Fitbit (who also don’t have smart rings), the company has never filed a smart ring patent. Not a single one.

That’s significant. When Garmin works on a new form factor, it usually starts by protecting the intellectual property. With smart rings, they haven’t even made that first step.

Publicly, Garmin has also downplayed the value of finger-based wearables. That says a lot. Executives have stated that rings cannot match the accuracy or data richness of wrist-based devices.

Their current sensor tech is a limiting factor. They can’t simply port it over. The Elevate module is large and uses multiple LEDs for optical heart rate tracking. Rings don’t offer the surface area to house such a sensor without making compromises. Compressing that capability into a tiny ring would come with real trade-offs. Issues like sensor size, skin contact variability and limited battery capacity are all difficult to overcome in that form factor.

And anyone who has used a smart ring knows – the wrist is a more reliable place for heart rate data during workouts or movement-heavy activities. That will be important to a company that has always built its reputation around high-quality health metrics.

Oura’s lawsuits make the space risky

Then there’s the legal side. Over the past couple of years, Oura has filed lawsuits against pretty much every major player attempting to launch a smart ring. Ultrahuman, Circular, RingConn and others have faced legal action. Samsung and Zepp Health, despite their size, are now caught in an ongoing battles with Oura in US courts over alleged patent violations. That shows how aggressively Oura is defending its IP.

Garmin has likely taken notice. The company generally avoids litigious markets where they do not control the core intellectual property. Jumping into the smart ring category right now would mean navigating a patent minefield with very little room for differentiation. The risk is probably not worth it. Between court fees and potential product bans, it would be a costly gamble.

Garmin prefers to work in spaces where they have freedom to innovate without interference. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case with smart rings at the moment.

The Index Sleep Monitor shows Garmin’s alternative

Rather than developing a ring, Garmin recently launched something else entirely. Instead of the “Index Smart Ring”, the company released the Index Sleep Monitor in mid-2025. It’s a screenless band designed purely for sleep tracking and recovery. The format allows Garmin to include its full Elevate sensor array, something that would be physically impossible to fit into a ring.

The decision here seems deliberate. Garmin looked at the same problem smart rings try to solve, comfort during sleep, and came up with a different solution. Instead of shrinking everything to fit on a finger, they expanded into soft wearable formats that don’t sacrifice sensor fidelity. The Index Sleep Monitor is lightweight, unobtrusive and works in tandem with Garmin’s watches. It handles overnight metrics without needing to duplicate the role of a daytime training device.

This approach makes more sense for Garmin’s platform. Which is increasingly centred around combining high-quality data from different sources and feeding it into its platform.

What the future might hold

It’s possible Garmin eventually introduces a ring, but there is little chance it could happen in 2026. For now, there’s no sign that such a product is in development.

Until the tech changes or the legal landscape clears up, Garmin seems happy to let others fight it out while they focus on data quality and system integration. Their attention is elsewhere, and their ecosystem already has the tools they believe matter most.

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