- This is so easy to lose it.
I lose this thing like twice a day and it blends in.
(instrumental music)
My name is Justin Redman,
I am an Associate Staff Writer
for sleep at the Wirecutter.
The Oura Ring is a wearable sleep tracker
that you wear on your index, middle or ring fingers,
and it's able to detect your sleep staging.
So how often you're in REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep.
How often you're awake during the night.
It's also able to detect things like heart rate,
heart rate variability, oxygen rate,
like how many breaths you take per minute,
as well as your skin temperature during the night.
Oura Ring can be traced back to 2015
when it was a startup,
they started on Kickstarter.
They subsequently came out
with the first version of the ring,
which was a bit bigger and bulkier than what we have now.
But this current version of the ring,
which looks kind of like a wedding band came out in 2018,
it's been around for awhile.
(playful music)
Big reason why the Oura Ring has gotten a lot of popularity
is because of the COVID-19 pandemic,
'cause of its potential COVID-19 tracking applications.
There's actually a study
released by West Virginia university.
It's important to note that
Oura worked closely with researchers
and providing access to data
released by the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute,
It said that this ring can detect COVID-19
three days before symptoms begin
with at least 90% certainty.
Now obviously these kinds of tracking technologies
are very much just experimental.
It is able to tell you with reasonable certainty,
a lot of things that are going on inside your body,
that you might not realize are going on.
I mean you could just be hung over
and your numbers could just go completely haywire,
but you could also have COVID-19
it can't differentiate between those two necessarily.
Anything that can track your heart rate,
heart rate variability, oxygen rate,
and skin temperatures
that'll be able to key you into some things
that are going on inside your body.
(bass guitar music)
If you can see like the little bumps in there,
it's like a pulse oximeter.
They are good at shine light beams through your skin,
based on how those light beams are reflected back,
they're able to detect changes relating to your blood flow.
They could at least give you some clues
about what's going on in your health.
(upbeat music)
I've been wearing this ring almost 24/7
for a few months now.
Other than charging it once a week,
you really have to wear it
most of the time for it's metrics to be accurate
because it tracks, sleep and activity.
How active you are during the day will impact how the ring
contextualize some of your data.
For example if you were to have just an insane workout,
you wake up your body is just completely sore.
You can't get out of your bed,
but you didn't wear the Oura Ring
while you were working out.
It's not gonna know.
The way it tracks activity is a little bit different
than you would expect from a wearable.
It's not going to track your active heart rate.
It's not gonna track your active heart rate variability.
It will be able to track the distance that you walked,
it will be able to approximate your calories burned.
It's not gonna tell you much beyond that
other than you were active.
It's still important that you wear it most of the time,
because it's gonna take that into account
for some of your scores.
And it's gonna take that into count into telling you
how much capacity you might have for the next day.
(playful music)
The core marketing claim is that this thing is able
to best approximate your wellness
more than other different fitness or sleep trackers
because of the heart rate, HRV monitoring elements.
The heart rate, heart rate variability measurements
are extremely accurate.
According to the validation studies
that Oura provided us
the heart rate measurement is 99.9% correlated
with measurements from an electrocardiogram.
And the heart rate variability measurement is 98.4%
correlated to an electrocardiogram.
You get almost medical grade accuracy
when it comes to this Oura Ring.
It does pretty well.
(playful music)
Especially in the beginning,
I was testing this alongside
several different sleep trackers,
including sleep score, pillow, sleep cycle,
and at least sleep as Android as well.
No sleep tracker is going to be perfect
because they don't actually look at your brain waves
like you would in the sleep lab,
but the results are fine.
They do Okay.
And it's just like all other sleep trackers
Oura Ring does about in line with that,
where it's not gonna be anywhere near
as good as a sleep lab,
but you're going to be able to get some useful information.
(cheerful music)
The high cost combined with the fact that
the features are a bit niche in many ways,
makes it kind of a tough sell for a lot of people.
So you kind of have to do your own analysis
of what do you want this ring for
after you've determined that
is it worth it for your purposes?
And if you're just looking for a sleep tracker,
I would advise trying a sleep tracking app
for 30 or $50 a year.
If you're purely looking for this fitness tracker,
you should probably get the Fitbit,
which is also quite a bit cheaper.
If you're not a workout warrior,
if you're not someone that really needs help with your
sleep, and you just want interesting data about your health,
then this would be a really interesting product
for you to buy.
In terms of coronavirus Oura Ring has the ability
to key you into your wellbeing
before you start getting sick,
but it's not specific enough to differentiate
what you're actually sick with.
Like I said before,
the same metrics that might suggest COVID-19
can also point to alcohol use, extreme exertion
or some other kind of a non-Covid illness
like just say the common cold,
but it can still give you interesting insights
to your overall health
or at least confirm what you're already feeling.
To see our in-depth review on the Oura Ring,
click the link below.
And if you wanna see more like and subscribe.