Open-source devs want to democratize health tracking with $18 ring from Aliexpress

Instead of paying half a grand for top-tier health trackers, you can try and build your own using a cheap generic device from Aliexpress for a few bucks.

The open-source community is rallying around the cheap COLMI R02 ring, which costs $11-$30, attempting to turn it into a highly capable health tracker.

The smart ring, packed with sensors, first caught the attention of firmware hacker Aaron Christophel, who found the ring to be easily hackable. The device includes an accelerometer, heart rate monitor, and blood oxygen (SPO2) sensors that could be used for steps, sleep, gesture tracking, and more.

Its open design allows users to upload custom firmware, enabling DIY projects.

One of the repositories on GitHub, inspired Cyril Zakka, a medical doctor, developer, and ML researcher, to create an open-source health monitoring solution called HALO for Apple devices.

Zakka is developing an open-source wearable alternative that “aims to democratize health tracking.”

“The market is flooded with sleek, feature-packed devices promising to revolutionize our approach to health and fitness. Yet, beneath the polished exteriors and marketing hype lies a troubling reality: most of these devices are black boxes, their inner workings shrouded in proprietary code and closed-source hardware,” Zakka writes in a community post on Hugging Face.

“As consumers, we're left in the dark about how our intimate health data is collected, processed, and potentially shared.”

The developer shared the first part in a series of articles that will serve as an entry-level guide to building your own wearable and “fully transparent, customizable, wearable device.” The first part of the code is for setting up and connecting the device.

The GitHub repository was unavailable at the time of writing. However, the article contains the required code and provides a step-by-step guide that is quite easy to follow. Zakka encourages others to improve the code or take it in a whole new direction.

For the DIY project, all you need to do is acquire a COLMI R02 ring, set up a development environment with Xcode 16 installed together with Python, and install the required libraries (Panda, Numpy, Torch, and Transformers), the guide explains.

However, the project is still in progress. The first part covers building and running your own app and connecting the ring to the iPhone. The developer invites explorers to stay tuned for the next article, which will explore how to read, and write data and use it to build features such as real-time heart rate monitoring, activity tracking, sleep phase detection, and more.

While the COLMI R02 ring shows promise as an accessible platform for health tracking, the full potential of the open-source initiatives remains to be seen.