Chunky bands and rings are all the rage, stylish enough that they don’t look like tech—until you spot the glow from their skin-facing sensors.
While the Apple Watch remains the most popular wearable overall , sales of these screenless health and fitness trackers are exploding. Smart-ring maker Oura raised over $900 million while performance-band maker Whoop raised $575 million in March. Both are valued at over $10 billion. undefined undefined U.S. purchases of fitness trackers grew 88% between 2024 and 2025 , according to market-research firm Circana. Smart-ring purchases alone grew 195%.
On May 26, Google will ship the Fitbit Air, a $100 no-display wristband aimed at comfortable, long-term monitoring.
As a yearslong wearer of an Apple Watch and an Oura, I understand the phenomenon firsthand. Simpler hardware means longer battery life, better for gathering continuous—and therefore more useful—data. And now that we’re surrounded by screens, we aren’t shopping for yet another one.
Round-the-clock data
Heart rate, blood-oxygen level, skin temperature, body movement and other readings aren’t useful in one-off measurements. Things get interesting when you track the changes. undefined undefined By monitoring you 24/7, these wearables can spot what Whoop Chief Executive Will Ahmed calls the “slight deviations that matter.” Your annual checkup, he argues, is a snapshot without context. undefined undefined Without a display, the battery only needs to power the sensors, so these devices can last far longer than an Apple Watch. The new Fitbit Air can last a week on a single charge, while the Oura Ring runs as long as eight days. The Whoop 5.0 offers as much as two weeks of battery life. And the Whoop has a charging pack that slides onto the band, so you don’t even have to take the sensor off to recharge.
The data also has predictive power. A few weeks ago, my Oura flagged “major signs of strain”—24 hours before I felt a sore throat and a stuffy nose. I was able to get a head start on recovery by going to bed early. undefined undefined People are paying for these insights. Oura’s subscription costs $6 a month, in addition to the $349-and-up hardware. Whoop’s membership starts at $199 a year and includes the band. (You can trial the service for a month and then have to commit to the year.) On the new Fitbit Air, $10 a month unlocks detailed sleep analysis and personalized AI fitness coaching .
Not a watch
No display also means no competing with the Apple Watch. Some people now wear both.
“If it has a screen, then it’s a watch. If it’s a watch, then you can’t wear two watches,” says Ahmed. You can also wear the Whoop sensor in the company’s specially designed boxers, bras and other apparel.
The Fitbit Air is designed to be worn alongside, or instead of, Google’s Pixel Watch. You can switch between the two, which both funnel data to the Google Health app. undefined undefined During the day, I wear my Apple Watch for notifications and GPS tracking. But my bedroom is a strictly no-screen zone, so I rely on the Oura for sleep tracking.
“People are increasingly looking for the benefits of health technology without the constant pull of another screen,” says Holly Shelton , Oura’s chief product officer. Without notifications, people can decide how often to check their stats, she adds.
And since the ring automatically detects when I’m working out, I can just do the activity without pushing buttons to start tracking it.
In general, wearable sensors have improved in recent years, as have the algorithms that interpret them. And wearing a ring gives you a slightly better pulse signal, says Shelton.
The research largely agrees. One study, with participants from Ohio State University and the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, found that Oura rings had a slight edge over wrist wearables in the accuracy of heart-rate readings .
Looking for longevity
If this all sounds like overkill—the continuous monitoring, the obsession with biometrics, the overwhelming amount of data—then these trackers aren’t for you. They really do give some people anxiety .
For the health curious, however, the data can be empowering. It’s one thing to know how to live healthfully, and another to be faced with raw numbers showing that you aren’t. undefined undefined Ahmed says the devices’ recent boost in popularity reflects a growing interest in living longer in good health . Whoop, Oura and Fitbit offer a metric for that: “cardiovascular” or “biological” age, which is an estimate of your heart health. (The American Heart Association has a free online tool that can crunch a similar score.) undefined undefined As the Grammy-award winning DJ Diplo said at WSJ’s Future of Everything conference , young people are trading nightclubs for run clubs in a quest to “live a longer life and have a good time.”
Whichever club you frequent, your wearable will know—and it will tell you all about it in the morning.
