Gadget Friday: Oura Ring Runs Circles Round Competing Fitness Trackers
The sensors are state of the art, but the secret to this fitness tracker’s success is its unassuming design.
All fitness trackers share a common problem. We have the technology to collect, analyze, and display an enormous amount of personal health data. Daily activity, heart rate, body temp, sleep times, sleep quality, and more. That is amazing. Unfortunately, this data often doesn’t lead to any change in actual behavior. Combine that with the general kludgyness of wearing an extra wristband or the hassle of recharging your Apple Watch every day and you can understand why most wearables end up in a kitchen drawer.
For me, the Oura Ring solves these problems. Its tracking technology, particularly when it comes to sleep, is on par or better than the rest of the industry. But what really sets the product apart is its design. It is the most unobtrusive wearable on the market. Combine that with a battery life that lasts all week and it is a wearable you will actually wear every day.
I’ve been wearing an Oura ring for four years, but have never written my own review of it. Part of this was because PCMag’s wearables expert Angela Moscaritolo kept scooping me; she is a faster writer and certainly more knowledgeable about health trackers than I am.
During that time, the Oura has become a bit of a sensation. The Oura went from being a subtle signal of the technical cognoscenti to adorning fingers of celebrities including, Prince Harry, Shaquille O’ Nea, Jack Dorsey, Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Odell Beckham Jr.. Oh, and also, Will Smith. (Thankfully, the Oura is plastic.)
At $299 plus a $6 subscription fee, the Oura ring is one of the more expensive trackers out there. Cheaper than a more full-featured Apple Watch, and more expensive than most Fitbits.
Buying the Oura ring is a little more complicated than picking up an Apple Watch at Best Buy. After purchasing the ring directly from the Oura website, the company will send you a sizing chart for the ring. After you pick your size, you complete the registration and the real thing arrives a week or two later.
The ring itself looks like a basic wedding band, which has been pointed out to me multiple times as I routinely switch left and right hands. Although it looks like metal, it is actually plastic and completely waterproof. Inside are two infrared sensors, two negative thermal coefficient body temp sensors, a 3D accelerometer, and a gyroscope. For people like me, that marvel of miniaturization alone is worth the price of admission.
The Oura Ring creates three daily scores to summarize your overall health:
Sleep Score: This tracks your deep, REM, and light sleep and compares them to your averages. It also records your nightly heart rate and best time schedule. Tracking your bedtime schedule seems like a small thing, but few of us do this effectively without a tracker.
Activity Score: This starts with your step count but adds workouts, heart rate, and more. This works as well as any other tracker on the market.
Readiness Score: This is an attempt to reflect your ability to physically perform. It balances your sleep and activity levels, then analyzes your body temperature and HRV for signs of stress.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is a data point most people aren’t familiar with. As the name implies, it measures the time between your heartbeats and it turns out, the greater variability the better. HRV is an indicator of how your body is balancing two branches of your autonomic nervous system: sympathetic (fight-or-flight), and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest). How does that reflect your personal wellness? The Cleveland Clinic puts it like this:
If your heart rate is highly variable, this is usually evidence that your body can adapt to many kinds of changes. People with high heart rate variability are usually less stressed and happier.
So how actionable are all these scores and metrics? For me, they work well. The activity tracker is pretty generic. We generally know how active we are each day. But do you remember when you went to bed last night? Or the night before? Probably not, and this has a big impact on sleep quality. Breaking down the sleep cycles is also revealing. I tend to drop into deep sleep early in the night and then bounce between light and REM for the rest of the night.
Perhaps the most dramatic data is the impact of alcohol on my sleep and overall readiness. I knew that drinking affected sleep, but the Oura Ring showed me the impact even a night of moderate drinking has on my readiness. I could show you those nights, but Dr. Peter Attila can do so with a far more scientific explanation:
A little case study on sleep & alcohol. Last night I had 3 drinks before/during dinner (super dark beer, wine), so call it 50 g of ethanol. My normal average HRV is about 28; normal RHR about 45 (though it’s been higher this week); and normal sleeping body temp somewhere between -0.7 and -0.3 F. Take a look at what happened to my sleep and recovery last night (this is using the Oura ring, for folks not familiar): HRV much lower, both in peak and average; RHR higher *and* look at how long it took to reach that nadir (just before wake-up versus what is optimal—in the first half of the night); body temp higher (despite Chilipad set at 55 F); gaps in my telemetry, due to excessive movement during sleep; and look at the destruction of REM sleep, just as described by Matt Walker in our episode—REM largely replaced by light sleep and frequent wake-ups. In my experience this happens with 2 or more drinks in the evening, which I try to limit to less than once per month. Despite “knowing” this, it’s always helpful for me to be reminded of how much ethanol trashes my sleep, because subjectively I feel “fine,” given the GABA-effects (sedation) of alcohol. But by being able to accurately measure HR, HRV, temp, etc., we can see a different story and make some estimates on sleep staging. Pretty, pretty, pretty, good (in Larry David voice). DISCLOSURE: I am an investor in, and advisor to, Oura. (Source: Peter Attia)
This kind of data is simply a cut above what most trackers can do today.
Still Far From Perfect
The Oura ring isn't perfect. Uploading data front the ring to your phone via Bluetooth can take multiple attempts. There isn’t a lot of cross-compatibility with Strava, Fitbit, or Apple Fitness. (You can sync data with Google Fit, which apparently, still exists.) Also, the company's fast growth seems to be overloading its technical support. User ratings on Google are an abysmal 1.8 out of 5! Other reviewers have pointed out the limits of its tracking capabilities.
Brian X Chen wrote recently in The New York Times that the Oura mistook his motorcycle ride for a workout:
After I rode home, I opened the Oura app. It said I had walked 20 miles. This was obviously wrong. I had walked only a mile that day when I took my dogs out for an afternoon stroll.
It was clear what had happened. The Oura had incorrectly logged a portion of my 100-mile motorcycle ride as footsteps.
So yeah, the Oura may not be a great fit for motorcycling fitness fans. (Oura is working on a fix for that.)
But it works great for me. The Oura ring is the only fitness tracker I am using these days if you don’t count the Fi smart dog collar that I use to keep track of Strider. For me, sleep timing, sleep quality, and daily activity are probably the most useful indicators of healthy habits. Showing me how my evening cocktail hours are diminishing my performance the following day is a much-needed warning. And the Oura platform is constantly improving., Blood oxygen measure could be coming later this summer. For me, the Our ring checks more boxes than any other.
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WTF happened to CNN+? I’m not saying it was a great idea, but it has been less than a month. Surely, a pivot would be a better option than throwing in the towel. Anyway, I know a lot of folks at CNN and I wish you guys the best. Reach out at dc@dancosta.com if I can help.