The Deus Ex Silicon channel opened three connected rings to discover their components. A difficult task due to their impossibility of disassembling them properly.
Specializing in electronics, videographer Stéphane Marty regularly enjoys taking apart consumer devices to discover their components, whether it’s their battery, integrated circuits or sensors. This Sunday, on his YouTube channel Deus Ex Silicium, the microelectronics engineer took apart three connected rings to discover their insides and how they work.
These are two connected health rings — the Circular Ring and the Oura Ring — and an NFC ring — the Aeklys ring — which were thus disassembled by the engineer. Logically, the components differ widely between the three models depending on their use.
Scan de la Circular Ring // Source : Deus Ex Silicium
Scan de la Oura Ring // Source: Deus Ex Silicium
Scan of the Aeklys ring // Source: Deus Ex Silicium
Stéphane Marty indicates for example that the Aeklys ring from Icare — which has not allowed contactless payment for a few months — offers a particularly simple operation. Without a battery, it only integrates a large NFC antenna, an NFC chip and a button to activate the ring. On the other hand, the two health rings integrate much more complex components, starting with their particularly thin batteries, one millimeter thick:
However, we must admit that it is a real tour de force to be able to integrate so much microelectronics into such a small circular surface.
Rings that are impossible to dismantle properly
In addition to the curved and very thin batteries, the Circular ring and that of Oura also integrate different sensors for temperature or heart rate analysis by photoplethysmography (PPG) using optical sensors. The rings are also equipped with relatively energy-efficient microprocessors to enable analysis and transfer of data from the rings to the smartphone.
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One of the main points to remember from Stéphane Marty’s video, however, lies in the difficulty of dismantling the different connected rings. Although he managed to remove the different parts of the plastic Aeklys ring quite easily by simply cutting it, he had to go through sulfuric acid baths for the other two rings. Above all, even once immersed in acid, it is impossible to detect some of the components of the Oura Ring, due to the damage caused.
This does not bode well for the repairability of smart rings. Given their particularly miniaturized format, these devices are not designed to be repaired and, once the batteries are empty or the components damaged, they become completely good for throwing away or recycling. Moreover, the rings obtained by the videographer come from some of his readers and were already inoperable for most of them.
