The temperature and humidity tracking seems accurate and tallied with other sensors in my home. The microphone produced some weird results for me, alerting me to loud sounds in my office in the dead of night. I could not find any cause, but I’m pretty certain these were false alarms. They did not recur when I moved homes. I asked Ultrahuman about this, and the company couldn’t offer any explanation (perhaps my old office was haunted).
The air quality sensors were the most interesting for me, but I found the alerts quite alarming. I got pretty frequent VOC alerts and a couple about toxic air and formaldehyde, which made sense after painting or cleaning. But I also got VOC alerts where I couldn’t identify any possible cause. These spikes faded quickly when I opened a window, but they also seemed to fade away, albeit slightly slower, when I didn’t.
I’ve lived oblivious to this stuff for almost 50 years, so I’m not entirely convinced that I need to know about it, barring some kind of gas leak incident or something truly dangerous. The alerts also had the unfortunate side effect of spiking my stress, tracked by my Ring Air, and I wonder if that was worse for me than the slightly stale air. In any case, a daily routine of opening my bedroom window has all but vanquished the alerts, though this won’t be practical as we head into winter.
Underbaked and Overpriced
Photograph: Simon Hill
The Ultrahuman Home could eventually be an interesting and useful gadget that integrates with your smart ring and smart home. If we’re going to work on our bodies to improve our health, it makes sense to put some energy into our environments, too. There’s a laundry list of “planned features” and the promise of Matter support. The Home may eventually combine environmental data with sleep tracking data from your smart ring, detect snoring and respiratory disturbances, and find interesting connections between the state of our bodies and our environments.
I’m most excited by the prospect of smart home integration. If the Home could close smart shades when light and UV exposure hit a certain level, automatically turn on AC when required, or trigger an air purifier when there’s a drop in air quality, it might be worth considering. For now, you could buy a really good air quality monitor for half the price.
Ultimately, the Ultrahuman Home is priced as though it already does all the wonderful stuff the company has planned, but there’s no telling when, if ever, it will fulfill its potential.
