Sleep trackers can be useful tools for getting a good night’s sleep, not because they actively improve your sleep habits, but they potentially help identify possible factors affecting your sleep. Some smartwatches may not actually help you track your sleep, but devices like the Samsung Galaxy Ring can. It may not be the best wearable device for sleep tracking, but it will soon receive an update that will allow it to track a common cause of sleep problems missed by many wearable devices.
During a livestream of Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked in July 2026 (which revealed several new Samsung devices), Sharanya Desai, head of digital health at Samsung, took the stage to discuss the capabilities and health benefits of using the Galaxy Watch 9, including how it could monitor your sleep. During this segment, Desai also said that starting this fall, “Galaxy Ring will be the first and only over-the-counter ring device approved by the FDA for sleep apnea risk detection.”
Desai said Galaxy Watches have been able to “identify possible signs” of sleep apnea “for years,” including determining whether a wearer has “breathing disturbances” commonly associated with sleep apnea. According to Desai, the wearable device will receive a “new FDA-approved capability” in the near future that will improve apnea detection. However, with the upcoming Galaxy Ring upgrade, you won’t have to spend as much as $500 (depending on smartwatch model) for a wearable device that can help track sleep apnea issues.
Prevention is better than cure
Even though Sharanya Desai promised that the Samsung Galaxy Ring would soon be able to diagnose sleep apnea, she didn’t elaborate on how the feature would work. Since the Galaxy Watch uses a BioActive sensor to track blood oxygen levels and leverage that data to estimate a wearer’s apnea-hypopnea index, or AHI (the average number of times you stop breathing or take shallow breaths in an hour), we can assume that the Galaxy Ring will detect sleep apnea in the same way.
At the end of the day, Samsung Galaxy wearables, whether a watch or a ring, are just that: devices. These are advanced enough tools to estimate your AHI, but they can’t actually tell you if you have sleep apnea. If you buy a Samsung Galaxy Ring or Galaxy Watch and they say you have sleep apnea, that’s not your reason to buy a CPAP machine, but rather to see a doctor and get their second (and more importantly, human) opinion. If they agree with your device’s diagnosis, follow their instructions.
