The home holds many secrets, but that shouldn’t include air quality. Studies have shown that indoor conditions can actually be worse than outdoor conditions in some homes, and that’s not all from pollution entering through your windows and vents. Everything from the dust you generate, the sprays and products you use, and even the airflow itself can contribute to unhealthy air quality.
Without an air quality monitor, it’s near-impossible to tell what might be causing irritation, poor sleep, or even longer-term conditions, but only in recent years have affordable models become available while still offering a good range of accurate testing metrics.
Earlier this year, Ultrahuman surprised us by stepping sideways out of the smart ring space and into the smart home with the release of the Ultrahuman Home. Its biggest selling point is not just its compatibility with Ultrahuman’s Ring Air smart health tracker, but the wide range of contributors it can measure, from VOC, HCHO, CO, CO2, and particulate matter from 1 to 10 micrometers all the way to UV and light exposure.
So, how useful is it? Having used it at home for a month, I can give it this much: it’s incredibly useful at first. It helped me crack the code to my recurring sleep issues, yes, but I’m not fully convinced, right now, that this is a product everyone needs in their homes 24/7.
What’s in the box?
Setting up the Ultrahuman Home is super easy; simply plug it in, download the Ultrahuman app, search for your device, and it’ll be paired in no time.
Though it does look a little like a Mac Mini, I love that the Ultrahuman Home can sit so discreetly on my bedside, on a desk, or even on an accent table without dominating the space; though it’s still a little larger than some of the more discrete options like Amazon’s smart air quality monitor.
Once you’re all set up, it’s just a matter of waiting and letting your new air quality monitor detect its surroundings. I left mine for a few days before doing much digging into the data to build an idea of what my home’s air quality would generally look like with day-to-day occupation; cleaning at my (semi-)regular intervals, spraying hair products with the window open, switching on the extractor fan system while we’re cooking, and the like.
While I’ve got pretty decent daily practices for air quality management, it suffices to say that Ultrahuman Home did not always agree, though very rarely for the reasons I thought it might not.
Overall, my air quality was pretty good throughout the day, though naturally, PM2.5 spikes occurred when I was cooking or cleaning and didn’t crack a window. The temperature stayed fairly consistent, and while showering and washing raised the humidity levels, everything stayed within a healthy margin, according to Ultrahuman.
That is, barring light exposure, on some days it registered excessively high infrared light levels. I’ve still not cracked this one, so I’m choosing not to be afraid of these results.
Data with purpose
An area where Ultrahuman Home was able to make a significant impact, though, was in helping to fix my sleep. Ever since I moved home earlier this year, I’ve found that I wake up with a sore throat and a headache, and I generally feel poorly rested and in need of a good 3-4-hour top-up nap.
Turns out there was a simple issue: the airflow in my bedroom was so poor that I was suffocating on my own and on my partner’s CO2. Thanks, lungs.
Unlocking this insight paved the way for further learning: without my apartment’s ventilation system on, my bedroom is dangerously stuffy. Turning on the ventilation, while effective, wasn’t enough to vent the CO2 with the bedroom door shut, but with it open, the CO2 levels, while elevated, were healthier.
After that revelation, though, I found myself at a crossroads. Now, I have a fairly expensive silver box with little else to teach me beyond what it’s already taught me about my environment; for a device costing $550 / £489 / AU$849.00, those aren’t great returns.
At some point, Ultrahuman Home will offer compatibility with some of the biggest smart home platforms like Alexa and Google Home, but as of right now, that’s still in development, meaning only you can act on the data generated by Ultrahuman Home.
As soon as smart home connectivity becomes available, it’ll be a fantastic way to trigger a wide range of automations to help keep your home fresh, clean, and comfortable, provided the integrations work well – and for the uninitiated in smart home tech, that’s not a given.
Pandora’s box?
Until that sunny day when we see (hopefully well-implemented) smart home connectivity, I’m struggling to justify keeping my Ultrahuman Home. I’ve scarcely opened the app since my sleep improved, and that’s unaided by the fact that Ultrahuman sends an abundance of (occasionally slightly terrifyingly worded) notifications, which makes opening the app kind of redundant at a certain point.
Also, while these notifications can be helpful in the short term as you adapt to better air quality management practices, there are some realities of the home you can’t affect, and they can begin to feel grating.
For instance, large-scale building works are taking place opposite my apartment, and when I first installed my Ultrahuman Home, demolition works were still underway. Every day for 4-5 hours, horrendously loud machinery pulverised rocks to rubble, and I would receive incessant notifications that the noise levels were too high and could be causing me hearing damage. You can adjust the frequency of notifications, but not which ones you get, so persistent issues around your home can quickly turn into spam on your homescreen.
Overall, while there’s a lot I really liked about Ultrahuman’s device, the future of this kind of monitoring is to combine those sensors with a more functional device; we already see this in some of Amazon’s best Alexa smart speakers, for example, and smaller sensors are readily available for cheap online to help monitor more specific sets of metrics.
It’s worth noting that I tested the Ultrahuman Home as a standalone device rather than in partnership with an Ultrahuman smart ring, meaning I couldn’t try UltraSync, which combines data from both devices to offer deeper insights and practical actions. From what I’ve seen and read online, many of the “personalized recommendations” boiling down to top tips you could have likely figured out for yourself, though much like in my testing experience, there are some genuinely useful steps along the way.
It does feel like the Ultrahuman Home is fundamentally a companion device for those with one of Ultrahuman’s best smart rings, but even if you do already have an Ultrahuman Ring Air, I’m not sure the Home pays its way just yet.
Plus, given that much of the smart home functionality that would make this a genuinely useful gadget around the home is, as of writing, unavailable with no clear roadmap to release, it’s really just a “nice-to-have” gadget for now.
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josephine.watson@futurenet.com (Josephine Watson)
