Review: Movano Evie Ring

No one was more excited than I was to try the Movano Evie ring. When it was first announced, I added it to our list of the Best of CES in 2023. I was excited to finally find a fitness tracker that solved an actual problem for an underserved population! It is really hard for many women to track their menstrual cycles, and this is especially relevant if you’re a woman in perimenopause. The 10 to 15 years before your period ends are typically characterized by health conditions like hot flashes and lack of sleep. Monitoring these conditions would be the first step to treating them effectively.

However, in the intervening year, almost every fitness tracker has come out with a similar cycle-tracking feature. Apple debuted skin temperature sensing and automatic ovulation detection with the Series 8 (8/10, WIRED Recommends), and so did the Samsung Galaxy Watch and the Withings ScanWatch (7/10, WIRED Recommends). Several months ago, the period-tracking app Clue introduced a new feature set, Clue Perimenopause, where you can manually track perimenopausal symptoms.

Most significantly for biological women in the United States, Roe v. Wade was overturned. Depending on where you live, you might not even want to track your period online at all. Assuming that you still want to track your period in an app, and don’t have menstrual cycle features on your existing fitness tracker, is the Movano Evie ring worth buying? Right now, it's probably not.

Affordable Price

The Evie ring has a number of great features. At $269, it’s relatively affordable (as far as smart rings go), and it doesn’t require an additional subscription fee. I used the free sizing kit and got my usual size 8, and the tester came in a gold finish (there is also silver and rose gold).

The ring itself is injection-molded and has a titanium finish that feels high-quality and comfortable, with tiny sensors packed into the inside. There is a notch cut into it, which makes the sizing a little more flexible than it might be otherwise. It can accommodate your hands changing size when you work out or have hormonal fluctuations, but the downside is that the notch gets caught in my hair.

The ring’s sensors include red and green LEDs, infrared PPG sensors, skin temperature sensors, photodiodes, and a 3D accelerometer. It also comes with a tiny portable charging case that holds up to 10 additional charges and itself charges via USB-C. When I first got the ring, I had multiple charging issues that were only resolved with frequent app and ring updates.

Right now, I get a little less than three days of battery life, which is not that much, especially compared to the Oura ring's five days. I also don't get any notification that the battery is dead, so I miss a lot of data if I don't check the app every morning. It takes two to three hours to recharge.

The app itself looks pretty perfunctory. It’s currently only available on iOS 16 or above, and it does not sync with Apple Health. The Daily Summary shows your day as a circle, but that circle doesn't seem to correlate with your activities for that day. For example, half of the circle is sleeping, even though I only sleep six to seven hours per night and not 12. A 40-minute run shows up as almost half of my daytime hours. You also have to log workouts manually in the app and can’t note what type of workout it was, only the duration.

It’s also pretty disappointing that the vaunted skin temperature sensor only shows you deviations from the average, and not a monthly graph. A monthly graph is the only way to see the minute temperature drop that occurs at the end of your cycle. You can see and record the drop on an Oura ring, but not with the Evie.

Competitors on the Horizon

The other data that the ring records seems accurate. I cross-checked the sleep measurements with a Coros watch and they tallied within a few minutes of each other—6 hours and 17 minutes of sleep versus 6 hours and 21, for example. I found no big inconsistencies.

The average heart rate is a few beats higher than the Coros—an average of 77 instead of 72. While it sometimes had trouble recording my blood oxygen, repeating the spot check usually fixed the problem. (I don’t have low blood oxygen, hooray!)

The step count did not tally with Coros’ at all, but that also didn’t surprise me. Many people like rings because they seem more convenient than wrist-based trackers; they don’t have screens, and you can wear your analog watch if you want. However, I take rings off all the time. I take the Evie off for rock climbing, but I also place it on a different finger when I’m washing dishes or playing the violin with my son. The Evie usually ended up with a step count of about 1,000 steps less per day, but I also see this with the Oura ring.

Movano claims that eventually the app will provide gender-differentiated, AI-enabled insights that will allow you to improve your health and overall well-being, but as they say, QIQO (quality in, quality out). At this point, there simply isn’t enough cumulative data for me to have gotten any insights from the Evie beyond “Lots of steps today! Great!”

On that note, I have yet to see any AI-enabled insights on any tracker that offer more useful information from an algorithm than anything I have learned from simply being alive. I don't need AI fitness tips telling me I need to sleep more; everyone knows that. What I need is Haruki Marukami muttering counterintuitive koans to me when it's time for me to go for a run.

Another differentiator between the Evie and other trackers is that the company applied for FDA clearance for its pulse oximeter that tracks heart rate and blood oxygen, with the intention of being a medical-grade device. Apple's latest watches have the blood oxygen sensor disabled because the company is currently embroiled in a series of lawsuits over it.

Overall, I found the experience of using the Evie ring to be a little disappointing. It's just not as easy to use, nor as woman-centric, as other trackers that have been around for years, and I still ended up logging my symptoms and period manually.

The fair thing to do would be to say that the software just needs more time to develop. Of course its predictions are wonky, and the insights rudimentary, when compared with the Clue app; I’ve been logging my period in that app for almost a decade at this point. However, with the Oura ring, it’s easy to pick out when my period is going to come within a matter of weeks of wearing it.

However, another point to keep in mind is that Samsung is coming out with a smart health ring this year, just ahead of a rumored Apple smart ring. This is the year of the smart ring, and of the choices available, the Evie just isn't that appealing. I'll keep the Movano Evie around to see if something useful pops up, but the company is running out of time.