How we Built the Thinnest ECG Smart Ring in the Market: The Engineering Behind India’s First ECG-enabled Smart Ring

The Orbyt v10 smart ring represents our biggest leap in engineering: a complete redesign that made it the thinnest ECG-enabled smart ring in the market. By rebuilding the PCB from scratch, shrinking enclosure thickness, fixing electrode corrosion, and upgrading charging architecture, we solved long-standing comfort, durability, and manufacturability issues. This version addresses two critical user demands - sleeker form factor and reliable ECG performance, while also cutting BoM costs and improving long-term wearability.

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Today, smart rings are a crowded field. Rings with ECG are also becoming popular. Users want medical-grade sensing in an invisible form factor: comfortable, stylish, and reliable. That combination is deceptively hard. Slimness and comfort are judged in millimetres; sensor fidelity depends on electrode placement and materials; durability depends on plating and the charger design; manufacturability depends on PCB layout and injection-moulding tools.

Private Beta: Listening to Users and Spotting the Soft Spots

We launched a private beta on v9 PCBs and collected structured feedback. Two themes emerged:

• Product dimensions: Users compared our ring against competitors and said our ring felt wider. In wearables, “wider” equals “bulkier” equals less comfortable. Even when tech specs are great, comfort kills conversion.

• Ring aesthetics and durability: The gold-plated electrodes lost luster and looked corroded over time. A lovely device that looks shabby after a few weeks is a design fail.

Competition had also intensified. Where we once led on features, rivals now matched sensors and optimized industrial design. That forced a very uncomfortable but necessary question: were we happy with our current hardware or did we need to reinvent it?

We decided to reinvent.

The Hard Constraint: PCB is the Limiting Dimension

When you’re designing a ring, almost everything else is a reaction to the PCB. The PCB determines the placement of sensors, the battery envelope, connector locations, and how the enclosure mates to the board. We had assumed our v9 PCB was already optimised. The beta changed that assumption.

A single component position was the root of many constraints. Rotating that component by 90 degrees opened a cascade of opportunities: trace routing freed up, the antenna clearance improved, and the board outline could be tightened. But this required rethinking the entire PCB stack-up and layout - so we did.

What we changed technically:

• Re-examined component placement and re-anchored mechanically critical components.

• Re-routed critical nets with manufacturability in mind.

• Recalculated clearances for the antenna and vias to avoid RF problems.

• Consolidated components into more compact packages where feasible.

After one focused weekend of redesign and a disciplined follow-up iteration, we reduced ring width by 1.4mm (yes, that single design move had a surprisingly big impact in perceived comfort). For a ring, the 1.4mm difference is significant. It can change the user’s decision to wear the ring to bed, which is essential for 24/7 wearability.

Rethinking the Enclosure

Reducing PCB width unlocked the next problem: the enclosure. We examined the entire stack: PCB + battery + electrodes + outer shell — and asked where we could remove millimetres without breaking reliability.

• Enclosure thickness reduced from 0.5mm to 0.3mm (these are the enclosure wall thicknesses or inner shell changes that let us collapse the profile).

• Re-engineered the internal support ribs to maintain structural strength despite thinner walls.

• Optimised battery orientation and component placement to shave overall ring thickness from 2.6mm to 2.4mm across all sizes.

Just like that, we went from being bulkier than the competition, to being the slimmest ring with the most number of sizes in the market! These changes required close work with toolmakers because thinner walls can introduce sink marks and warpage.

Electrode Plating: Why Gold Loses Luster and What we did About it

Gold plating looks premium, conducts well, and resists corrosion - but not all gold processes are equal. In our early batches the gold-plated ECG and charging electrodes lost their lustre over time. That wasn’t just cosmetics: corrosion increases contact resistance and hurts ECG signal quality.

Root causes we investigated:

• The plating process used a decorative finish rather than a durable, contact-grade finish.

• Environmental exposure (sweat, humidity cycles) accelerated surface breakdown.

• Mechanical wear from repeated charge/discharge cycles and daily wear introduced micro-abrasion.

Fixes implemented:

• Switched to a more robust plating technique for ECG electrodes (contact-grade plating with a suitable pre-processing step). We worked with plating vendors to confirm the appropriate thickness and adhesion practices.

• Introduced a gentle fillet on electrode edges to reduce wear at contact points.

• Added protective process steps during assembly to avoid contamination before plating and final inspection.

Electrode reliability wrt plating is part material science and part supply quality control. Improving plating saved us long-term aesthetics and signal integrity.

Charger Redesign: Waterproof Pogo-Pin Connector vs Plated Strips

Charging designs can be deceptively simple or a constant headache. Our early design used gold-plated strips. While functional, those strips corroded and complicated the moulding process (they were also hard to align reliably).

We redesigned the charging interface to use a waterproof pogo-pin connector. This solved several problems at once:

• Corrosion resistance: Pogo pins can be manufactured with corrosion-resistant, waterproof contacts

• Moulding reference: The pogo pin assembly served as a mechanical reference during moulding, making assembly repeatability much better.

• Ease of use and durability: Magnetic nature of the pogo pins nullified misalignment issues and made user experience much smoother.

The change simplified manufacturing and improved long-term durability — a rare win in hardware where fixes usually trade one problem for another.

BoM Optimization and Supplier Partnerships

Around the v10 cycle, component distributors and suppliers began pitching alternatives. Instead of reflexively rejecting them, we set up a structured evaluation:

• Identify critical components (sensors, PMICs, battery, RF chip) and mark them as “do not substitute” without rigorous equivalence testing.

• For non-critical passives and some mechanical parts, we validated alternate suppliers with sample runs and stress tests.

• Negotiated volume breakpoints with our distributors (even small MoQs can yield price breaks when consolidated across SKUs).

Result: ~10% BoM cost saving across critical categories while maintaining quality. This helped offset the increased NRE we spent redesigning and tooling for v10. The lesson? Engage suppliers proactively; often they want you as a reference customer and will help optimize costs if you measure and validate rigorously.

Competitive Position: From Bulkier to Slimmest ECG Smart Ring

Redesign is costly and scary, especially mid-beta. But two principles guided us:

• Measure everything. If you can quantify comfort, yield and usability, you can make data-driven decisions.

• Iterate deliberately. One weekend of focused redesign led to a cascade of improvements; that was possible because we had disciplined testing and supplier partners ready to execute.

Small geometry changes don’t read well on spec sheets, but they matter in the hand.  A slimmer ring increases nightly wear, which improves signal capture and user stickiness. Better aesthetics and robust charging reduce returns and increase trust.

After v10 we could honestly say: we moved from being bulkier than competition to being one of the slimmest rings with ECG and the widest size range in the market. That’s a marketing claim grounded in real physical changes — not just PR.