TECH REVIEW: Oura Ring (Gen2)

 (Dementia - Owl City) 

Managing your health has never been a crystal-clear proposition. Much of what constitutes your current state of health falls down to data points that people have historically had a hard time putting their hands on without a massive struggle. There's the near-constant struggle with health insurance that most Americans deal with, the never-ending wave of fads lurking in wait for the unwary, the sheer level of effort that it takes to find a medical professional that you're comfortable working with...

Oh yeah, and the internet.  The internet is absolutely a net negative here for most people...

I digress.

As it has with so many other things, technology stands poised to take a stab at getting you that data without the heartache. Fitness trackers have evolved considerably in the last decade. The current generation of devices are clever enough to gather biometric data that's accurate enough to be useful...but what do you do with it after you have that data?

Oura is hoping they can answer that question for you. Their primary product is a ring that you wear on your finger. In exchange for a slightly gaudy piece of jewelry that is ostensibly unobtrusive, you get useful medical data and guidance -- again, ostensibly -- on what to do with yourself as a result.

It's that question of usefulness that ultimately dictates whether you should purchase one, so let's get right into it.

As a device, Oura already has a HUGE advantage over just about every other kind of fitness tracker out there: It's easy to keep on and almost never needs to be taken off. That's hugely relevant because the more you wear any fitness tracker, the more data it can gather on you. That might sound creepy but it's very necessary in order for just about any biometric tracker to be useful. Biometric data -- that's things like your heart rate, your temperature, your blood oxygen levels, your levels of physical exertion, your weight, etc. -- is really only useful when you can put it in context. Let me make that live for you real quick:

I've been slowly losing weight over the last two and a half years. Most people judge weight loss by looking at a scale, myself included. My scale tells me that I haven't lost any weight in about a month and a half...which means I must not be doing something right. Surely, I need to eat less, to work out more!

What most people don't understand -- for SO many reasons... -- is that your weight is only one very small piece of data when it comes to your health, and just taking it once or twice is basically pointless. In order for most forms of biometric data to be useful, you need to be able to view it in a field, to see trends and behaviors. Only then can you begin to see the 'big picture' of what your body is doing and act accordingly.

For the record, my scale also measures a number of other very relevant datapoints like fat mass, muscle mass, water weight, and bone density. Then it saves that data and plots it in a format that allows me to see said big picture, week over week. My net weight hasn't changed, but my fat mass is lowering and my muscle mass is growing. 

SCIENCE!

This is why data is so important, and why the Oura ring's form factor is so brilliant. You forget that you have it on most days, so you never take it off.  The result is oodles and oodles of really powerful biometric data that you can make good decisions with!  Right away, that's a HUGE win for this wearable device.

The Oura ring is gathering two primary sets of data. The first is 'waking' data, things like your workouts, your activity level throughout the day, steps you've taken, approximate levels of calorie burn, your temperature, and your resting heart rate. The second set is 'sleeping' data, things like how long you're sleeping, your level of fitfulness during sleep, the amount of different types of sleep (deep, REM, light, dozing) that you're getting, what time you're going to sleep, what time you're waking up, respiratory rate, and your heart rate variability. Oura's app can also interface with other fitness apps like Apple Health and Activity to add data from those apps to its 'big picture' datapoints

All of this is very interesting information but it's also very pointless without perspective. It's this perspective that will make Oura more or less useful to you. As mentioned, Oura has a mobile app that's required for the ring to function properly. The ring itself can only hold around three days' worth of biometric data before its internal storage is full and it needs to download that data. To preserve battery life, this data is only downloaded to your phone when you open the Oura app. This is good for the battery but it also demands that you open the app at least once every few days. I thought this would be more annoying than it actually ended up being, which was a non-issue.  That comes down to just how Oura presents its data to you. 

When you open the Oura app -- after you've initially configured the ring, that is -- you're immediately presented with the first of the four major information tabs that the app offers, the 'Home' tab. This is the app's summary tab for just how you're supposedly doing. You see things here like your readiness score, a number that comes with recommendations on how to physically conduct yourself for the day. If your score is high, the app encourages you to go out and be active, or maybe try something new!  If the score is low, the app encourages you to take it easy, or just flat out take a day off of physical exertions. This seems like a really powerful way to use all of the data the ring has gathered on you thus far...except you're never really told how the ring is coming to its particular conclusion. You can tap on the readiness score to learn more but the app never gives anything more than a simple explanation. Maybe you didn't sleep so well? Maybe your heart rate didn't fully lower last night? Maybe your temperature is a little high or low? Those are all excellent rationalizations but the ring never offers the same explanation twice in a row, so it's really hard for you to take its recommendation at face value. The data on the home tab gets even more confusing as you scroll down to find the ring's recommended level of physical activity for you that day. My average recommended activity level recommends that I try to burn 700 calories doing something like walking a certain number of miles. (If you work out, those calories will apply themselves towards this number.)

Naturally, you would expect higher levels of readiness to correspond to higher calorie burn challenges and lower levels of readiness to correspond to lower calorie recommendations. That's not what my experience with the ring has shown me. I have any number of archived daily datapoints where the ring is outright asking me, "Hey, are you okay? Maybe you should take it easy today." and then recommending the usual level of calorie burn rather than a lower number. Then there are the datapoints where my readiness score is 'Good', but the advice for me that day is, 'Go easy! Give yourself time to recover!' aaaaand a recommended calorie burn of 700. Indeed, you have to get into really low readiness scores before it will adjust the calorie recommendation down to 450.

I am not a novice when it comes to interpreting biometric data. I'm fortunate enough that I have a whole slew of doctors that have been kind enough to guide me. Not everyone is though. If for no other reason, I would never recommend this to someone without a giant warning on it first.

If you dig deeper into the other three tabs within the Oura app -- Readiness, Sleep, and Activity -- you get into the individual datapoints that the Oura ring is tracking. For the 'power users', this is where the potency of the ring really begins to show itself. Being able to see all of your 'waking' data and 'sleeping' data laid out in a field over a period of time is incredibly valuable to some people like me. Personally, the more of this data I have access to, the better I feel about where I am currently with my health. This is data I can share with my doctors. It prompts the kind of discussions that people should be having with their doctors. It prompts me to take agency for myself and places the responsibility squarely on me to do something now that I have the data. I need that to keep my mind in the right place with my weight loss journey.

The ring can also provide much more practical data by telling you if you've been repeatedly sleeping poorly or if your temperature is strongly elevated. Both are wonderful early warning signs for certain illnesses. If you're someone with a habit of acting intelligently with this information, this is wonderful. If you're prone to nervous Goggling for random symptoms, you might skip this one. And the internet.  Definitely skip the internet.

Some other quick information about the Oura Ring:

- Oura does its job using several sensors and LEDs on the inside of the ring. The ring is completely sealed and can be showered with or worn in a pool.

- Oura charges using a custom induction charging rig. If you're not letting your Ring track your workouts, you can easily get two weeks out of a single charge. If you ARE letting the Ring track your activity, you'll blow through your battery in a few days. The upside here is that the battery in the Oura Ring is TINY and can be charged fully in about 45 minutes. Pro Tip: When you take the ring off to charge, set a timer on your phone to remind you to PUT IT BACK ON. Trust me.

- I'm currently wearing the second generation Oura Ring, which is no longer available. The third generation Oura Ring has seven temperature sensors -- up from three in the 2G - that collect biometry with greater accuracy and allows for a few additional data points to be gathered. There's also a few new LEDs that allow for tracking blood oxygen levels. The upgrade wasn't significant enough to justify a purchase for me. 

- Third generation Oura Rings also cone with a $5.99/mo subscription fee that is mandatory for the Ring to function. I like my Oura Ring well enough, but not enough to pay a monthly fee on top of the $300 ($400 depending on what color you want...) price tag. This isn't helped at all by the fact that some of the 3G's new functionality isn't even online yet.

- Neither the 2G or 3G Oura Ring should be viewed as a workout tracker. That's not what the ring is designed to do, though it will import workout data from other fitness trackers like the Apple Watch. The closest thing that the Oura Ring has to true workout tracking is monitoring your level of physical activity. It frequently makes suggestions to capture workout data when it believes that you've been working out but the feature is rather hit and miss. My ring frequently asks if I've been working out after I get out of the shower. I have no doubt that it thinks I've just done something active because of all of the movement my hand goes through when I wash my body. This is ample evidence that, like all fitness trackers, you should be taking all of your data with a generous grain of salt.

At the end of the day, the Oura Ring is a wonderful tool for providing reasonably accurate biometric data. The app is simply too contradictory to instill confidence in following its recommendations without further consideration though.  And hey, why should you?

You're responsible for your health. Not a ring.