I’ve always struggled to get the right amount of sleep and recovery. I have lots of memories trying – and failing – to keep my eyes open in college classes (and, embarrassingly, even a meeting or two as a summer intern)! After I graduated, my sleep schedule was often in chaos as I juggled early flights, meetings in different time zones, and catching early buses. So in December 2020, I bought the Oura Generation Two ring to help me figure out my sleep, and in November 2021 I bought the new Gen Three ring.
After over a year, my verdict is in: the Oura is an insightful and opinionated guide that helps me prioritize sleep and recovery. It’s convenient and waterproof: I’ve worn it almost 24/7 since getting it, only taking it off once a week to charge or when lifting to avoid scratching it. I even wore it recently on a weeklong kayak and camping trip! I’ve also personally convinced 5 friends to become Oura users.
In this article I’ll talk about how Oura’s helped me, why I chose it over other fitness trackers, and where I think it has room for improvement. Here are 4 ways Oura has helped me be healthier:
#1: Identifies unhealthy trends
I know for sure when I have a trend of not getting enough sleep or recovery. Before, it would be easy to shrug off a bad night’s sleep as a single day with an early morning. Now, I can clearly see when that one bad night is part of a broader trend of prioritizing work over sleep. It does this by giving a score each day out of 100 for each of Sleep, Recovery, and Activity. The scores are accompanied with a few tidbits of advice for “taking it easy” or “going hard”, like this:
I love being able to have these macro trends called out in a way I can’t dismiss them; I previously wrote about how I wished health trackers would do more to flag long term trends here. Oura does a great job visualizing change over time for individual stats as well, though I’d love for it to proactively identify longer-term changes in these stats, like how my sleeping Resting Heart Rate decreased over several months:
#2: Understand immediate impact of my choices
On a more micro level, I can directly understand the impact of making less-healthy choices, like eating a lot very late, drinking a lot of alcohol, or working out very late at night. Here’s my recovery score after a night of partying:
With this information, I can make more informed decisions about if and when to do certain activities.
#3: Oura feels like an ever-present coach
Oura sends push notifications when I’ve been inactive for too long – which usually spurs me to get up and walk around the house. (I do wish I could customize the generic suggestion “time to get moving?”, to something like “do two pull ups” or “walk for two minutes.” I’d be even more likely to do these specific tasks.) It also identifies my “ideal bedtime” and sends me a notification when it’s approaching:
I find a big mental load is removed when my “Oura coach” calculates the ideal bedtime target for me.
#4: It’s a canary-in-the-coalmine for if I’m getting sick.
With over 20 different supporting metrics available, I now know my baseline for respiratory rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and body temperature. It can be an additional check for if I’m getting sick, though it of course shouldn’t be used to diagnose anything. (See these studies for more info about using wearables to detect Covid-19: Study 1 and Study 2.) A related example – here’s how my temperature changed when I got my second Covid vaccine shot:
Why I chose Oura vs. other wellness trackers
Many general app-only trackers, like Google Fit, simply don’t have robust sleep tracking beyond “sleep time” and “wake time.” Compared to sleep-focused software-only apps like Sleep Cycle, Oura lacks the useful “wake me up when I’m already in light sleep” feature, but is much more accurate since it uses bodily metrics and not just audio to interpret sleep quality. I find Sleep Cycle scores to regularly be too high.
Compared to wearable alternatives like the WHOOP band, Apple watch, or Fitbit, I personally prefer Oura’s form factor: non-intrusive, no-screen, and a legit piece of jewelry. It’s also very light (anyone I hand it to always remarks on how much lighter it is than expected). The subscription is also cheaper per month: $6/month vs. WHOOP’s $30/month or Fitbit Premium’s $9.99/month. (As a Gen Two owner, I’m grandfathered in with no monthly fee.) The ring itself does have a one-time purchase fee starting at $299.
Speaking of cost – I was slightly unpleasantly surprised when, after buying my Gen 3, I received an email asking me to send back my Gen 2 (I’d paid almost $400 for the piece of hardware!) to donate. Instead, I gifted my Gen 2 ring to a friend. I’d have been more likely to donate if I knew the names and missions of the vague “institutions” interested in my refurbished ring.
How can Oura improve the product experience?
Oura is a prominent leader in a broader trend of wearables moving beyond wristwatches. Other early movers include the Bellabeat wearable which can be worn on a necklace or the WHOOP 4.0 meant to be worn “anywhere” on the body. Oura’s been making moves: raising $100M in a Series C at a $800M valuation back in May 2021; hiring for dozens of positions across North America and Europe; and moving to a subscription business model. They’ve been steadily announcing new partnerships (like with the NBA, Red Bull, and the World Surf League), as they move to capture as much of the $11B+ wearables market as possible. I can see them further expanding their investment in guided content and pursuing other payers and partnerships.
But most importantly, they’re going to have to deliver on the promised Gen Three features. Compared to the Gen Two, the Gen Three has more hardware sensors (such as workout heart rate tracker and a blood oxygen level detector) that will unlock more software features like Period Tracking and Activity Heart Rate. It also comes with more video content. Unfortunately, most of the new software features aren’t available until 2022, and Activity Heart Rate was actually delayed beyond the original target end-of-2021 launch date:
Aside from launching the above, I’m also hoping to see Oura improve:
(1) Activity tracking. Oura’s step count usually disagrees with both my Google Fit’s estimate and with the treadmill’s own estimate, which tend to agree more with each other. And calorie estimation is too high: maybe 300-400 over what I know my Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) to be.
(2) An easier-to-use, more insightful tag system. Today, you can add a tag at a specific time – essentially a small note like “Strength training”, “Beer”, “Weighted blanket”, or “Late screen time.” I’d like to see more tags: even something like perceived happiness and energy levels over time. I’d also like to see the tag system used to create robust analyses: what activities are correlated over time with better sleep or recovery?
The tag system also has a bit of an input problem because it requires user input and specifically for users to remember to input. I’d love to see inferred tags and activities, which could be based on movement data, location data (“went to massage parlor and stayed for 1h”), or “usual” activities. Even just suggesting tags the user could confirm would remove the mental load of manually searching and adding tags.
(3) More opinionated interpretation of the website’s trends. Did you know that Oura has a desktop site where you can see your data, at https://cloud.ouraring.com/trends? It’s pretty cool for the data nerd side of me; you can select any target time period, as well as any two metrics, and it will spit out a correlation. Here we can see that my time in bed has a weak negative correlation with my bedtime, probably mirroring that the later I go to sleep, the less I sleep, given a generally constant waking time for work.
I’d love to see Oura identify more interesting correlations – including with time delays – and suggest related behavior changes, like: “When you average 1000 more steps a day over a month, your Resting Heart Rate improves by X in the following months.”
With members opting in for anonymous data usage, I’d also be very interested in cross-user trends and correlations across the larger Oura membership base. How do my stats compare to the “average” member? What behavioral changes are generally correlated with better outcomes?
(4) More tangible ways to improve sleep. I wish that the Oura companion app would offer a smart alarm based on sleep phase (“wake me up when I’m in light sleep” feature), or venture into integrations with a broader sleep ecosystem. I’d take its suggestions on a marketplace of sleep-related products to buy, based on the trends it’s seeing (and this seems like a great business opportunity for lucrative partnerships). An integration with Smart Devices could also make sense – playing morning news or turning on smart lights.
As a Daily Active User (actually, my phone tells me I open Oura an average of 5x/day), I’m really excited for Oura’s already-solid offering to grow into its big product (and business) headroom. It helps me get my ZZZs and consequentially feel better each day – it is a quintessential proof of “what gets measured gets managed.”