From hard-on leaderboards to penis age scores, the new technology has me by the balls.
It’s Men’s Health Week at Playboy and we’re exploring the increasingly DIY state of men’s healthcare. From the peptides ruling Hollywood to the Reddit forums replacing doctors, men are taking their health into their own hands. Here’s what you need to know.
I was about a week into testing the TechRing — a stretchy, nooselike synthetic band that loops around the shaft and testicles to measure the firmness and duration of erections — when I got an email from the company inviting my penis and me to compete for cash.
The promotion, timed to Men’s Health Month, was structured as a weekly leaderboard; whoever logged the most erections during the month would win. Grand prize $500, second place $250, third place $100, and the rules were specific: daytime only, no nocturnal erections, even though those are the ones that matter medically. As of week 3, some guy named Alex was leading the pack with 74, followed by Eamon and Neal at 54 and 53 logged boners respectively. Just so you know.
The TechRing is one of two erection trackers I was testing in the name of journalism. I came to the trial by way of biohacker Bryan Johnson, who, in 2024, shared his own boner data alongside his unique routine for the de-aging of his penis. I kept wondering how he got all this information about his hard-ons, which largely came in the form of frequency and duration of his nocturnal erections. The answer, I found out, is kind of like an Oura Ring, Fitbit, Whoop, or Apple Watch—just for your penis.
A healthy man has three to six nocturnal erections every night, whether he knows it or not. They’re a real biomarker produced by the vascular system, and some data indicates that issues there can present a few years before the rest of a man’s cardiovascular system shows trouble. If erectile trouble can be an early warning, it makes sense (to a certain degree), that somebody would start building a device to track them. Make that two somebodies, actually.
The Adam Sensor by Adam Health is a sleek, ringlike contraption with retractable wires instead of a band; it tracks your nocturnal erections passively and hands you an “AndroAge,” a single number meant to express the biological age of your erectile function. The sensor was developed by a small team out of London, and was written up in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2022 as a low-cost tool for tracking nocturnal erections in men with erectile dysfunction; it’s also the device Johnson deployed.
The FirmTech TechRing takes another approach, employing that nooselike structure I mentioned earlier. Because of the design, it works both during sleep and sex (or, uhh, solo activity). The TechRing produces an Erectile Fitness Score and lets you compare yourself to other men your age. It is simultaneously a medical device, a fitness tracker, and a sex toy, hence the competition. (I was genuinely tempted to try my hand — so to speak — but unlike my younger days, I just didn’t have the juice.)
The TechRing is also the product of a guy who has spent years selling things like this: Dr. Elliott Justin, a 73-year-old emergency-medicine physician and serial entrepreneur who studied Slavic languages at Harvard before going to medical school, and who has spent the better part of 50 years thinking professionally about erections.
Before the ring, there was a failed erection experiment involving an electrode implanted into two male sheep — and Justin himself. His wife calls him the Louis Pasteur of human sexuality. He came to this discovery by accident; a colleague told him that nocturnal data might predict vascular health, and “this was news to me,” he says. The company now has a database of hundreds of thousands of erectile readings from several thousand men, which Justin can credibly claim is the largest of its kind, and which a University of Utah researcher is mining for what they’re internally calling the Big Data paper.
Justin’s actual thesis is more specific than “track them boners.” Most erectile dysfunction, he argues, isn’t a problem of blood getting in — that’s the version the pills are designed to fix — but of blood staying in. The vast majority of men, he says, get an erection and then lose it, and a ring targets that more directly than a pill does. In my experience, I’d say the device offers at least a 5-10% bonus in rigidity, with the added benefit of me being very excited to check phone data afterward with my very patient girlfriend.
Adam Health’s pitch comes with a little less free-wheeling energy; Head of operations Stefanos Alexandrou was deliberate about what he could support. He’s candid that AndroAge, the device’s headline number, is “a wellness metric, not a medical age,” and that a single night’s data means little on its own. The eye-catching stat on the company’s site (69% of users lower their AndroAge within 90 days, by an average of 14 years) reflects only men who tracked consistently. It’s a more careful pitch than FirmTech’s. “You don’t need to convince someone to care about their health,” Alexandrou told me in an email. “You just need to make the insight accessible and relevant.”
In the olden times, the gold standard for collecting those insights was the RigiScan, an expensive device that involves sleeping in a doctor’s office with two loops around your penis, connected to a recorder strapped to your leg that periodically tighten to measure rigidity. It is, by every account, a considerable pain in the ass — which is presumably why, even though the device is still on the market, few people bother.
Dr. Nelson Bennett, a urologist at Northwestern with no financial relationship to either company, confirmed as much when I called him. The current way to test things sounds even less pleasant: a series of chemical injections in the junk designed to stimulate erections for an ultrasound.
Either way, nocturnal erections are the truest read on a man’s natural erectile capacity, he said. The conscious brain isn’t involved, so there’s no performance anxiety. As a predictor of cardiovascular trouble, though, Bennett ranks the data well below basics like blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, smoking status, and exercise; it’s “third tier,” he says.
“The science is the science,” he said, “and there is some benefit there,” but in his telling, it’s a small piece of a much bigger picture, and his worry is the leap from one to the other: yes, there’s a vascular component, but plenty else goes into cardiovascular health besides nighttime erections. “That’s just one of the minor variables there. So when they start overreaching this, that’s when I have an issue,” he says.
With all that in mind, I embarked on my own erection tracking journey. Like most guys, I’m pretty fond of my penis, so if it had anything to tell me, I was open to listening.
Here’s what I can tell you after several weeks of wearing both devices: FirmTech’s TechRing is more multipurpose, and it is straight-up great as a toy. I can easily see it living in the bedside table for a tracked session now and then. The Adam Sensor is a more next-gen looking product, and I imagine if they get their hands on enough data, it’ll be pretty accurate, given that it just does one job. It’s also a good bit more comfy during nighttime wear.
On an intellectual level, I do kind of understand my erectile fitness better than I did before, though I’m still not sure what I do with my numbers. I got an 8.8 on the FirmTech (that’s basically a B+) while my AndroAge lined up with my real age. I wouldn’t hate it if those numbers were better, and in my single days, I considered myself an A student — so I’m currently planning my first physical in years.
Dr. Amy Pearlman, a urologist who sits on FirmTech’s scientific advisory board, sees this as the whole point of penis wearables. She compares the TechRing to “an EKG for the penis,” and points to an unpublished study comparing it against the RigiScan, in which the two reportedly tracked closely. But her bigger point is about access, not accuracy.
Most men, she says, will never set foot in a urologist’s office until something is badly wrong, and by then, the conversation is already about a problem. A wearable — something you already own a version of, something that gamifies and normalizes the data — gets men talking about their bodies years before a crisis forces the issue.
“I’d rather die a little bit younger,” one of her patients told her, describing how he felt about navigating the healthcare system for a routine referral, “than ever experience that again.” Pearlman says that if a $300 ring with a leaderboard gets that guy to notice something is wrong before his heart does, the leaderboard is doing real work, gamification and all.
That’s why I booked that appointment with my doctor: partly so I can flex my data, but also because I can’t resist the thrill of “number go up.” I am aware that I have fallen into the trap; it’s got me by the balls.