Review: Ultrahuman Home

The Ultrahuman Home is a futuristic-looking home environment monitor that tracks air quality, light, sound, and temperature. All this data flows into the Ultrahuman app on your phone, offering potential insights into your environment and suggestions on how you could make it healthier. Sadly, this mostly amounts to reminders to crack a window open, because most of the touted features are not yet present and correct, despite the rather hefty $550 price.

Ultrahuman made its name with a subscription-free smart ring that made biohacking more affordable (though it may soon be banned in the US due to a lawsuit from Oura). The Home monitor may seem like a strange sidestep, but if you’re going to hack your body, why not your environment? After all, we know air quality, light and sound exposure, and temperature and humidity can impact our sleep and general health.

Setup and Tracking

Photograph: Simon Hill

Taking a leaf from Apple’s playbook, the Ultrahuman Home is a 4.7-inch anodized aluminum block with rounded corners (it looks like a Mac Mini). There’s an Ultrahuman logo and light sensor on top, a power button and LED on the front, and a USB-C port on the back flanked by privacy switches to turn off the microphone or connectivity (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth).

Setup is super simple: Plug it in and add it via the Ultrahuman app. The Home gets its own tab at the bottom of the Ultrahuman app, alongside the ring, and if you tap on it, you’ll get a score out of 100, indicating how healthy your environment is. Scroll down for a breakdown of the four scores that combine to create your overall Home score (air quality, environmental comfort, light exposure, and UV exposure).

Ultrahuman via Simon Hill

Ultrahuman via Simon Hill

To compile all this data, the Ultrahuman Home is packed with sensors:

• Air quality sensors to track things like volatile organic compounds (VOCs), typically released by cleaning fluids, and carbon dioxide levels (CO₂) that might indicate poor ventilation. They also watch out for formaldehyde (HCHO), carbon monoxide (CO), and smoke.
• Particulate matter sensors to track tiny particles in the air, including things like dust, pollen, mold spores, and particles released by cooking. Covering PM1.0, PM2.5, and PM10 (the number refers to the size in microns), the Home warns if you’re in danger of breathing these particles in.
• Temperature and humidity sensors to track how warm or cool it is and how much moisture is in the air. You get a chart of the temperature in your environment and the humidity level.
• Light sensors to track the level of light and also its makeup, including the amount of blue light and ultraviolet (UV) exposure.
• Microphones to track the noise levels in your environment, showing noise in decibels in a chart.

Ultrahuman via Simon Hill

The data is all easy to access and read in the app. You get notifications throughout the day, including alerts if VOC levels spike or there’s prolonged noise. I set the Home up in my office for a few weeks and then tried it for another couple of weeks in my bedroom, after I moved houses. This raises the issue of where to put it, because it must be plugged in and isn’t really designed to be moved around. The bedroom seems like the best bet, but you ideally want both, though I can’t imagine springing for two or more of these to cover all your bases.

Oversensitive and Alarming

Photograph: Simon Hill

The idea of combining body and environment tracking data seems smart, but the Ultrahuman Home doesn’t really do it yet. The touted UltraSync with the Ultrahuman Ring Air is limited to basic common sense advice for now. I don’t think anyone really needs a box to tell them they will sleep better in the dark and quiet, and the air quality advice mostly amounts to opening a window for better ventilation.

The temperature and humidity tracking seems accurate and tallied with other sensors in my home. The microphone produced some weird results for me, alerting me to loud sounds in my office in the dead of night. I could not find any cause, but I’m pretty certain these were false alarms. They did not recur when I moved homes. I asked Ultrahuman about this, and the company couldn’t offer any explanation (perhaps my old office was haunted).

The air quality sensors were the most interesting for me, but I found the alerts quite alarming. I got pretty frequent VOC alerts and a couple about toxic air and formaldehyde, which made sense after painting or cleaning. But I also got VOC alerts where I couldn’t identify any possible cause. These spikes faded quickly when I opened a window, but they also seemed to fade away, albeit slightly slower, when I didn’t.

I’ve lived oblivious to this stuff for almost 50 years, so I’m not entirely convinced that I need to know about it, barring some kind of gas leak incident or something truly dangerous. The alerts also had the unfortunate side effect of spiking my stress, tracked by my Ring Air, and I wonder if that was worse for me than the slightly stale air. In any case, a daily routine of opening my bedroom window has all but vanquished the alerts, though this won’t be practical as we head into winter.

Underbaked and Overpriced

Photograph: Simon Hill

The Ultrahuman Home could eventually be an interesting and useful gadget that integrates with your smart ring and smart home. If we’re going to work on our bodies to improve our health, it makes sense to put some energy into our environments, too. There’s a laundry list of “planned features” and the promise of Matter support. The Home may eventually combine environmental data with sleep tracking data from your smart ring, detect snoring and respiratory disturbances, and find interesting connections between the state of our bodies and our environments.

I’m most excited by the prospect of smart home integration. If the Home could close smart shades when light and UV exposure hit a certain level, automatically turn on AC when required, or trigger an air purifier when there’s a drop in air quality, it might be worth considering. For now, you could buy a really good air quality monitor for half the price.

Ultimately, the Ultrahuman Home is priced as though it already does all the wonderful stuff the company has planned, but there’s no telling when, if ever, it will fulfill its potential.