On October 3, 2024, Patently Apple posted a report regarding the Finish company  Ōura releasing their fourth-generation of smart ring.

The bottom line is that the Ōura ring is a health oriented smart ring, period. Apple’s health centric device is the Apple Watch. So an Apple smart ring would have to be able to bring users another dimension for it to have much value.

Today the U.S. Patent Office published a patent application of Apple's titled "Electronic Device System With Ring Devices,” that relates to a smart ring that’s primarily focused on allowing a user to control other devices such as smartglasses, a TV, a Mac along with Home devices such as a coffee maker, house lights and other appliances using 3D finger gestures.

Apple’s patent covers electronic devices in a system that may be controlled by a user. The user may have one or more wearable devices and/or other electronic devices. The devices may include sensors for gathering input and output devices such as displays, speakers, and haptic output components.

A user's device may be used in identifying a target electronic device of interest among the electronic devices in the system. The target electronic device may be identified using a gaze tracking sensor that senses the user's point-of-gaze, a radio-frequency sensor that detects a direction in which the user's device is pointed, or other sensor circuitry for detecting pointing input, gestures, and other user input.

Visual feedback, audio feedback, and/or haptic feedback may be provided to the user to confirm which electronic device has been identified as a target electronic device of interest.

User input may be gathered by a touch sensor, force sensor, gesture sensor, or other sensor circuitry in one or more user devices and this user input may be used in adjusting operating parameters in the target electronic device of interest.

The target devices that the ring could work with include an iPhone, iPad, TV, Home Devices (home appliances, lights, thermostat etc.).

A user may, for example, provide touch input, gesture input, force input, or button press input with a first device that is used to control content that is being displayed on a display, audio that is being played with a speaker, and/or haptic output that is being generated with a haptic output device in a second device. Additional devices (e.g., a third device) may be used to provide additional processing power and/or to facilitate communications and/or coordination between devices.

During operation, a ring worn on a user's finger may, if desired, be used in gathering information on interactions between the user's finger and the system in addition to tracking movement of the finger and other user interactions. For example, circuitry in a ring may be used to capture real-time readings on the location (e.g., the position in three dimensions), orientation (e.g., the angular orientation), and motion (e.g., the change in position as a function of time) of the ring. These activities may be used in controlling devices in the system.

A secondary use of a smart ring can include health monitoring operations.

Input-output devices #12 of FIG. 1 below may also include sensors #18 that may include force sensors (e.g., strain gauges, capacitive force sensors, resistive force sensors, optical force sensors, etc.), audio sensors such as microphones, touch and/or proximity sensors such as capacitive sensors (e.g., a two-dimensional capacitive touch sensor integrated into display #14, a two-dimensional capacitive touch sensor and/or a two-dimensional force sensor overlapping display #14, and/or a touch sensor or force sensor that forms a button, trackpad, or other input device not associated with a display).

For health, the ring may include heart-rate sensors (e.g., optical heart-rate sensors that emit light and detect this light after it has passed through a user's flesh), blood oxygen sensors such as optical blood oxygen sensors, electrocardiogram sensors, other health sensors, and other sensors.

Touch sensors for display #14 or for other touch sensors may be based on an array of capacitive touch sensor electrodes, acoustic touch sensor structures, resistive touch components, force-based touch sensor structures, a light-based touch sensor, or other suitable touch sensor arrangements. If desired, a display may have a force sensor for gathering force input (e.g., a two-dimensional force sensor may be used in gathering force input on a display).

If desired, sensors #18 may include optical sensors such as optical sensors that emit and detect light, ultrasonic sensors, optical touch sensors, optical proximity sensors, and/or other touch sensors and/or proximity sensors, monochromatic and color ambient light sensors, visible light image sensors, infrared image sensors (e.g., thermal image sensors), fingerprint sensors, temperature sensors (e.g., thermal sensors that sense contact by fingers and other user body parts by measuring temperature changes), sensors for measuring three-dimensional non-contact gestures (“air gestures”), pressure sensors, sensors for detecting position, orientation, and/or motion (e.g., accelerometers, magnetic sensors such as compass sensors, gyroscopes, and/or inertial measurement units that contain some or all of these sensors), radio-frequency sensors (e.g., sensors that gather position information such as information on the orientation of the sensor and distance of the sensor relative to a device that emits associated radio-frequency signals,

Bluetooth circuitry that performs location and tracking operations using angle-of-arrival and angle-of departure information, sensors using ultra-wideband radio technology to perform indoor positioning using time-of flight information, other radio-frequency sensors that use time-of-flight information, radio-frequency sensors that gather three-dimensional radio-frequency images, and/or radio-frequency sensor circuitry that gathers other information using radar principals or other radio-frequency sensing techniques), depth sensors (e.g., structured light sensors and/or depth sensors based on stereo imaging devices that capture three-dimensional images and/or gather other three-dimensional data), optical sensors such as self-mixing sensors and light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors that gather time-of-flight measurements, humidity sensors, moisture sensors, pressure sensors, gaze tracking sensors that track a user's point-of-gaze and/or eye motion relative to a user's head, retinal scanning sensors that gather biometric information such as information on a user's unique pattern of blood vessels in the user's retina, iris scanning, and/or other eye-based biometric authentication sensors, three-dimensional sensors (e.g., time-of-flight image sensors, pairs of two-dimensional image sensors that gather three-dimensional images using binocular vision, three-dimensional structured light sensors that emit an array of infrared light beams or other structured light using arrays of lasers.

The smart ring could also work with home devices such as a dishwasher, coffee maker, thermostat, window blinds, house lights and many more devices.

For full details, review Apple's patent application 20240362312. Apple has been working on a possible smart ring since at least 2014 (published in 2015). Since there have been many ring related patents and here are just a few of them: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08 and 09.  Below is one of the patent figures from a previous patent.