Ultrahuman to deploy biological-age model across UAE under Abu Dhabi health deal

The deal

Ultrahuman, the Bengaluru-based health startup best known for its smart rings, has signed a two-year memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center (ADPHC) to develop and validate a biological-age model intended, eventually, for people across the United Arab Emirates. According to TechCrunch, the model will pair clinical biomarkers with data from wearable devices to estimate how quickly a person is aging and to identify the factors — sleep, activity, cardiovascular health and metabolism among them — that may be accelerating or slowing that process.

CEO Mohit Kumar framed the partnership as the company's first step toward running one of its health algorithms at national scale, and as evidence of a broader shift in how Ultrahuman sees itself. "If you look at Ultrahuman as a company, we obviously have the Ultrahuman Ring, which is a way to acquire data from the human body," he told TechCrunch. "But truly, what we care about is not just the form factor, the ring, but what do we do with this data?"

Wearable-agnostic by design

Although the company made its name with a ring, the biological-age model is being built to be wearable-agnostic. Data from rings, wrist-worn devices, straps and patches can feed into the system alongside clinical biomarkers, and once deployed, individuals would be able to check their health age through UAE government digital-health platforms including TAMM and Sahatna.

The next two years are reserved for research and clinical validation. Kumar said the broader rollout will happen in phases but did not offer a timeline.

The model itself was developed using Ultrahuman's existing data: users' chronological ages combined with wearable signals and, for a subset of users, blood-test markers. That lets the company track how health markers typically change with age and flag deviations from those patterns.

Why Abu Dhabi

The UAE is already among Ultrahuman's ten largest markets, generating roughly 4% to 5% of its revenue, and the startup has sold about 800,000 rings globally. Kumar told TechCrunch that retention in the UAE runs about 25% higher than in its other markets, where it has operated for nearly five years.

The bigger draw, though, is population reach. Ultrahuman's own customers tend to be between 25 and 43 years old, while a government-backed deployment would expose the model to a much broader range of age groups than a consumer wearable business can reach on its own.

Data handling and a crowded field

Kumar stressed that the model will not be trained on UAE data. "We will deploy an algorithm on the UAE data," he said, adding that Ultrahuman will not have access to personally identifiable information through the program.

The deal is also not Abu Dhabi's only wearables experiment. In May, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi announced a partnership with Oura, Ultrahuman's chief rival in smart rings, to combine Oura's wearable data with the emirate's longitudinal health records, starting with women's health and cardiometabolic risk. Kumar said he was unaware of any other company working with Abu Dhabi authorities on a health-age model specifically, and declined to discuss the scope of Oura's arrangement.

Both companies are racing to move beyond hardware sales and deeper into preventive health. TechCrunch also reports that Ultrahuman is working on a smart ring capable of running software on the device itself, supporting everything from AI interactions to games.

Why it matters

Most health algorithms built on consumer wearables are tested against the companies' own customers — a self-selected, relatively young population. A two-year clinical validation process backed by a public health authority is a different proposition: it is one of the more concrete attempts yet to blend wearable-derived signals with clinical biomarkers and deliver a single interpretable number — biological age — through government health infrastructure.

For Ultrahuman, success would validate its pitch that the ring is a data-collection vehicle rather than the end product. More broadly, it is a live test of whether consumer-grade sensors can scale to population level while meeting clinical rigor and workable data governance. And with Oura running its own Abu Dhabi partnership in parallel, the emirate has quietly become the proving ground for what national-scale, wearable-based preventive health might look like.