Ultrahuman, the Bengaluru-based smart ring maker, has signed a two-year memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center (ADPHC) to develop and validate a Ultrahuman biological age model that will eventually reach people across the United Arab Emirates.
The announcement, made on Monday, marks the startup’s first step toward deploying a health algorithm at a national scale. The Ultrahuman biological age model combines clinical biomarkers with wearable data to estimate how quickly a person is aging and to flag the factors that may be speeding up or slowing down that process.
What the Abu Dhabi Partnership Covers
Under the agreement, Ultrahuman and ADPHC will spend the next two years on research and clinical validation of the Ultrahuman biological age model. The company said the broader rollout will happen in phases, though CEO Mohit Kumar did not provide a timeline.
The partnership is designed to be wearable-agnostic. Data from rings, wrist-worn devices, straps, and patches can all feed into the system alongside clinical biomarkers, rather than being limited to Ultrahuman’s own hardware.
Individuals will eventually be able to view their health age through government digital-health platforms including TAMM and Sahatna, according to the startup.
From Smart Rings to Health Data
Ultrahuman is best known for its smart rings, but Kumar framed the company’s ambitions around what happens after the data is collected.
“If you look at Ultrahuman as a company, we obviously have the Ultrahuman Ring, which is a way to acquire data from the human body,” Kumar said. “But truly, what we care about is not just the form factor, the ring, but what do we do with this data?”
That shift in emphasis helps explain the appeal of working with a government. Ultrahuman has sold around 800,000 smart rings globally so far, giving it a customer base that skews between 25 and 43 years old. A national deployment would expose the Ultrahuman biological age model to a far broader range of age groups.
How the Ultrahuman Biological Age Model Works
Ultrahuman developed the underlying model using its existing data, combining users’ chronological ages with wearable signals and, for some users, blood-test markers. That allows the company to track how health markers typically change with age and to identify deviations from those patterns.
Kumar was explicit that the model will not be trained on UAE data. “We will deploy an algorithm on the UAE data,” he said, adding that Ultrahuman will not have access to personally identifiable information through the program.
Privacy and Validation Still in Progress
The two-year validation period is intended to test the Ultrahuman biological age model before any wider release. Because the rollout will be phased and no timeline has been shared, it remains unclear when the general public in the UAE will be able to access their health age.
Why the UAE Matters to Ultrahuman
The UAE is already one of Ultrahuman’s 10 largest markets, accounting for roughly 4% to 5% of overall revenue. The startup has operated there for nearly five years and reports about 25% higher retention in the market compared with its other regions.
Those figures give the Abu Dhabi deal commercial weight beyond its research value. A government partnership offers distribution at a scale that direct-to-consumer ring sales cannot easily match.
Ultrahuman and Oura in Abu Dhabi
Ultrahuman is not the only smart-ring maker working with Abu Dhabi on preventive health. In May, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi announced a partnership with Ultrahuman rival Oura to combine the company’s wearable data with the emirate’s longitudinal health data, initially focused on women’s health and cardiometabolic risk.
Kumar said Ultrahuman is not aware of another company working with Abu Dhabi authorities on the health age model specifically. He acknowledged that the government works with multiple health-tech companies but declined to comment on the scope of Oura’s work.
The parallel partnerships reflect a broader race among smart-ring makers to move beyond hardware and into preventive health, where recurring data and algorithms can outlast the device itself.
What Comes Next
Ultrahuman is also looking to build a smart ring that can run software on the device, potentially powering everything from AI interactions to games. That hardware ambition sits alongside its push into health algorithms, suggesting the company sees the ring as one input among many rather than the end product.
For now, the Abu Dhabi agreement is a research and validation project with a two-year runway. Its success will depend on whether the Ultrahuman biological age model holds up against clinical scrutiny — and whether a wearable-derived health age proves useful enough for people to act on.
