A company called Vital Signals has opened pre-orders for the Signal Ring, a smart ring that checks your blood pressure throughout the day. It costs $399 on signalring.com and is expected to ship later in 2026. Engadget

The company was founded by Tom Moss, who was an early member of the team that built Android at Google. He later helped start a phone company called Nextbit and ran operations at a drone maker called Skydio before starting Vital Signals in 2023. He spent three years developing the ring with two engineers he hired from Masimo, a company that makes sensors for measuring blood oxygen and other health signals.

The idea came from a personal scare. Before starting the company, Moss was hospitalized with a blood pressure reading of 250 mmHg, which is dangerously high. That experience led him to design a device that checks blood pressure passively and constantly, rather than only when you sit down with a traditional arm cuff.

The ring scans your blood pressure on its own throughout the day. You can also take a reading on demand, and when you do, the ring tells you to sit down, get comfortable, and breathe slowly while it works. Afterward, you can tag the reading with what was going on at the time, like whether you had just worked out, eaten, smoked, or had coffee.

Moss was openly critical of blood pressure features on existing smartwatches. He said Samsung Galaxy Watch readings drift between calibrations and called them "less than useless." The ring's finger-worn design is meant to solve that problem, since blood vessels in the finger are easier to read accurately than those near the wrist.

Moss said the ring will not require a monthly subscription. He also said the company will not build AI into the product, though users can export their blood pressure data and use whatever AI tools they want on their own.

The ring comes in US sizes 5 through 13, requires a sizing kit before shipping, has a battery life of about three days, and ships with a charging case.

Vital Signals is working to get approval from the FDA, the U.S. agency that regulates medical devices, with the long-term goal of partnering with health insurers on preventative care. The regulatory environment may be moving in a helpful direction. In January 2026, the FDA started writing new rules for blood pressure devices that don't use a traditional cuff and instead rely on light-based sensors to read blood flow, which is the category the Signal Ring falls into. Federal Register

The broader context is that building a wearable blood pressure monitor has been a hard problem. Smartwatches that try to do it have struggled with accuracy, and the idea of measuring blood pressure all day without a cuff has been more of a goal than a real product. A ring on your finger may be a better approach, because the blood vessels there are easier to reach and the finger moves around less than the wrist during a reading.

The decision not to include AI is worth noting at a time when nearly every health gadget seems eager to add one. Moss is positioning the ring as something that collects data rather than tries to explain it, which avoids tricky questions about whether an AI giving health advice could be held responsible for bad guidance. Users can still take their data and feed it into an AI tool of their choosing. Whether buyers see the lack of built-in AI as a smart choice or a missing feature is an open question.

Skipping the subscription is also a deliberate choice. Other health rings, like the popular Oura ring, charge a monthly fee. Vital Signals is betting that a one-time $399 purchase, combined with FDA approval and eventual deals with insurers, can keep the business running. That depends on insurers agreeing to pay for preventative care, and on government regulators moving on a timeline the company cannot control.

For now, the Signal Ring is a pre-order from a startup that has not yet shipped any products and has not yet received FDA approval. The team's background and the regulatory direction are encouraging. But the real test will come when the ring reaches customers and independent tests can confirm whether the readings are accurate.