Was I supposed to know what this product does before reading this page?
I got halfway down where they start to talk about the sensors but then goes off into "The multiple sensors inside the ring form an 18-path multi-wavelength photoplethysmography (PPG) subsystem to provide highly accurate, continuous data throughout the day and night."
What does this thing do and how does that improve my health/life? Nvm I don't care at this point. I must not be the target demographic to wonder such things.
Think of Apple Health as more like the Photos app on iOS than an online service like Garmin Connect or Google Fit or something like that.
Apple Health data are only stored on your device unless you choose to synchronize them to iCloud, in which case they're e2e encrypted.
Apple does occasionally offer the option to contribute to research studies, in which case they'd have access to the relevant data but this is an explicit opt-in.
All the Apple Health data are also available through HealthKit APIs so that they can be used in other apps, including various export apps (though export is also a native feature). Use of this API requires an explicit app-specific and data category-specific opt-in from the user.
All this is to say: I don't think it's accurate to say Apple owns your data in this case. Apple likes to put themselves as privacy-first and you may disagree more generally whether they live up to their image but IMO this is one of the cases where they've done a pretty good job.
Log in to Oura on the Web with your Oura account details
Select the profile OOTW profile.png in the upper right corner > My Account
Under Export Data, you'll find options to download Oura metrics in either CSV or JSON format
Completely agree. I have a Circular Slim and the device itself is awesome and some of the data visualization is pretty good.
I stopped wearing it because the app is so user hostile. The ring can't sync in the backround, so each time you open the app you need to wait 30 sec while it syncs. After it syncs there are a series of popups about coins, stars, and streaks. Then you need to dig through a bunch of AI garbage to see the data.
I just want to see my heartrate while I run and track my sleep. There's no need for so much gamified nonsense in the app.
I was curious about getting one of these things, and your comment prompted me to find this - looks like it's totally possible to collect & interpret yourself: https://github.com/Pinta365/oura_api
Very few people want to interface with a wearable locally and store the data locally (esp via a mobile app given the use case here).
I have spent my entire career messing around with APIs and platforms and I have no interest in doing this DIY. oAuth into Oura ring's servers, which is totally available to you, is just fine.
If privacy is this much of a concern, why wear a trackable wearable in the first place?
You can export the data and analyze yourself- I do so with mine, but there is no open interface to connect directly with the device, you cannot avoid sharing your data with them.
I’m guessing this is part of their “startup-y-ness” that they need to sell the possibility of insane growth to VCs? Because just from an engineering perspective, I don’t see why it needs a monthly subscription to run a server crunching the numbers — couldn’t iOS and Android health apps handle all this data pretty well, with all-local processing? Maybe there’s more complicated ML pipelines involved in “adapting to your physiology” than I’m imagining… otherwise it seems like a random choice.
My second Oura ring (3rd gen) is ~3 years old and is currently collecting dust in a drawer because the battery lasts < 24 hrs, and If you forget to sync your data by opening the app (which can take a minute or longer of having the app open in the foreground) before it dies, it dumps all data collected since the last sync. Super frustrating.
I might be able to get it replaced if support decides to be generous, but dealing w/support is a pain, and the alternative is buying a $400 replacement every 2-3 years when the battery starts to fail.
I don't have to pay the monthly subscription - they had a deal where you could buy a third gen ring (at full price) and would get lifetime access without paying a monthly subscription. Despite that it still doesn't feel worth it to me to have yet another device I have to babysit (remember to sync with the app every day, remember to wear, remember to charge) and pay hundreds of $ to replace every 2-3 years. With the subscription cost, there's no way this product's value proposition makes sense for me.
I had the exact opposite experience with support, possibly the best one yet with any company.
I opened the live chat on the battery life support page and the chatbot asked (paraphrased) "Is your battery bad? Put in your email address". I put my email in and the next automated message was "Seems like your battery is underperforming, where should we send a replacement ring?"
I had the exact same pleasant experience. I had a Gen 2 ring with battery issues, and support was fast and painless with a new ring on its way in a couple of days.
Chiming in to say the same. Best support experience I’ve ever had with a company. Battery was lasting less than 3 days, talked to the bot for 2 mins and confirmation of a new ring being shipped was received a day later.
> Oura Ring 4 starts at $349, with Oura Membership pricing at $5.99 per month or $69.99 per year.
Oura business team forgot they now have much more competition than they had 2 or 3 years ago.
Competitor that doesn’t charge a monthly fee, and competitor like Samsung that will be « good enough » for the average joe while being cheaper and without monthly fee.
I don’t see how they can remain profitable in the near future.
In case by "competitor", you're referring to Ultrahuman, I disagree that they're a competitor.
Ultrahuman provides an overwhelming amount of information and a lot of useful-seeming recommendations on top of it but in my experience, the data collected by Ultrahuman are inaccurate to the point of being useless. For example I can be exercising with an ECG chest strap recording a heart rate of 170bpm and the Ultrahuman ring will consistently report 90bpm.
I haven't tried Oura personally (hard to get it in my region) but they do have a decent quantity of well-run studies to validate their measurements. Ultrahuman has close to zero validation. They do have their metabolic score feature that has some amount of proper validation but it's essentially a nicer UI for some very mature hardware from a completely different company.
If there's a real competitor without a subscription fee though, I'd love to hear about it.
I really like the Oura, and have had a 2nd gen which works great for nearly 7 years- battery still going strong. However the 2nd gen had no monthly subscription fee, which I really hate... I am not sure if I would be willing to upgrade, as I have a huge aversion to subscription fees.
Overall, I don't really like their software either- in my experience their 'sleep score' is in no way correlated with quality of sleep, just length. The main factor in my sleep score that makes it really high is having severe accumulated sleep deprivation, so I sleep longer. In my opinion factors like sleep efficiency (e.g. not waking up a lot) should be the main thing in the score. Ultimately nobody really knows what "good" sleep is- it is variable from person to person and can't be meaningfully represented as a single number.
I generally just pull the data into Python, and analyze it myself.
Probably my most interesting finding is the massive negative impact even small amounts of alcohol have on my sleep. Even a single beer 4 hours before bedtime almost completely eliminates deep sleep. I've come to the conclusion that drinking early in the day is likely actually somewhat healthier, despite being culturally unacceptable. I've also found that the humidity really affects my sleep - especially altering breath rate- but I'm not sure what to make of that.
If you wake up a lot at night and still feel tired in the morning... have you tried doing a sleep study? I believe that obstructive sleep apnea is severely under-diagnosed.
Yes, I did a real sleep study and they said I do indeed have "mild" sleep apnea but it "isn't bad enough that we are willing to treat it." I do usually need several naps to get through a typical day- and that is after identifying and treating three other major health conditions that can cause fatigue.
The newer Oura rings actually have an integrated pulse oximeter and can measure apnea, but mine does not.
I wonder if I should just buy a CPAP on my own and see if I feel better. I probably should also lower my bodyweight... I am a weight lifter, although fairly lean, I am a big guy, and losing some weight might reduce apnea events.
I did. Bought it myself. Learn how to enter clinician mode by holding the right buttons for your model. It's quite shocking how controlled and artificially limited things are in CPAP-land. cpap, and more advanced machines have identical hardware, but they cost orders of magnitude different prices. For many people have different pressure when inhaling vs exhaling is important - so called BiPAP. Everyone tells you start with CPAP, but if it turns out you need BiPAP then you need to replace the entire machine even though hacking the software works in, ahem, certain cases.
> I do usually need several naps to get through a typical day
If that was me, I would pester either the same doctor or a new one to get a CPAP machine. It's not a set and forget device, you may need to try a few masks and tweak the settings until you find something that really works for you, but once it's dialed in it makes a big big difference to your quality of life.
Trying to lose weight when you are not getting adequate sleep is an uphill battle. There are plenty of lean people that still need CPAP to get adequate sleep -- I was one of them.
I'll try but it is Kaiser- typically at Kaiser these judgements are out of the physicians control, they will fund a treatment only if you hit some specific number on a test- and it is virtually impossible for the doctor to override this- they need to get a bunch of signatures from other doctors, and use tons of political capital.
I have two other major health conditions that badly needed treatment, which Kaiser would not treat, and I paid an outside doctor with cash to be able to receive treatment.
Damn, I would really like such a thing, if it was just the hardware and not the associated lock in to a third party getting their grubby hands on my internal metrics.
I'd pay a premium for it even, which makes you wonder just how much money Oura must be making off the data of its users... (if they weren't, there'd be an incentive to sell the hardware)
I'm surprised Oura hasn't pursued using the ring as an input method as the guy suggests in the video. It'd be super cool to like double-tap the ring then use it as a scroll wheel when running and listening to music/podcasts, interact with AI models, etc.
Looks like those generic rings are supported by gadgetbridge[1] so barely any hacking needed for 100% on device processing and storage.
I have a miband I use with gadgetbridge. I'm reasonably happy with the app, and it has visibly improved over the last year (it also wins by default being opensource + the only option for keeping data private) but the watch is a bit bulky when sleeping or typing so I stopped wearing it.
I can't imagine $10 hardware will be particularly accurate, but cheap price + data control is enough to give me an excuse to play with one.
From all the alternatives linked to the listing it seems like it may be pretty generic hardware under a bunch of names. Would be interesting to see if the accelerometer in it could be used for gesture detection, and if the rings could be used for Bluetooth presence detection (e.g. for automatic screen locking).
So, do I get any functionality if I just buy the ring, or do I _have to_ subscribe? I mean does the ring have any basic features that work without subscription, or do I pay monthly even for the basic features?
You need to subscribe. It's $5.99/month. You get daily/weekly/monthly/yearly reports, and you can download all the raw data from their website at any time to do your own processing.
For those looking to the upgrade from a Gen 3 ring. I've seen some mentions that Gen 3 users might need to downsize for a Gen 4 because of less prominent sensors [1].
$400 and a monthly subscription to a company that is known for only one product feels like a really shitty deal to me. I know people with various versions of this product and they do like it, but it's a hard sell for me to want to put that kind of money in.
I'll eventually upgrade my Oura Ring 3, but I'm irked about the need for a new charger. Yeah, it comes with one, but I need a second one because of my living arrangements. So it's another $59 because they couldn't make the new ring compatible with the old charger.
I've had mine for over two years now, and I've been pretty happy with it. I got it as an alternative to an Apple Watch for health & fitness monitoring, and it has turned out better than I expected. I think it's better than the watch in some ways, such as the battery life being long enough, and the ring being comfortable enough that I can easily use it while sleeping.
I'd be curious to hear from Oura Ring fans what they find so useful about them beyond the initial period where you get to diagnose poor sleep patterns and maybe a low step count. What value do you get out of it long term?
The sleep data is useful for fine tuning sleep. For whatever reason I don't see the big effects of alcohol that others mention, but I do see the effect of late day caffeine and also of stress.
The readiness / stress stuff is useful as well. Its better at picking up physical stress ( increased running volume, etc ) than mental stress, but its a useful feedback mechanism.
I'd love to be able to set alerts on specific measurements. Sometimes I feel like specific measurements are very predictive for me, but the rolled up score isn't as useful.
It's also able to tell if I'm getting sick a bit before I can tell.
* Track my sleep (ongoing, not just initially) - My sleep wasn't as good as I thought it was, so it's good to try and improve my sleep hygiene. I like seeing how much deep and REM sleep I got the night before and my blood oxygen levels. The app will advise to take it easy if it thinks your readiness isn't good, which is a good excuse to chill out :)
* Daily slovenliness tracker - it'll remind me to get up and have a move around if I've been sat still too long.
I've started resistance training recently and it's good to see the progress before any significant outward physical differences appear:
* Track my workouts
* Track activity - its figures are a little on the high side for calories burned, but if you treat it as a relative guide, then it's useful.
* Track recovery
* Track heart-rate and resting heart-rate
* Track heart-rate variability
* Measure VO2 Max
* Track stress - I always thought my intense periods of work were potentially stressful, turns out they're not and I rarely get stressed!
I pay no attention to the 'steps' figure, instead the app sets a daily goal - based on your readiness - with calories burned (or sometimes it'll tell you to have some downtime if your body temperature is high, or your sleep was poor, or your recovery wasn't good).
The long-term trends it tracks are just good to see, as one of the other commentators said: it's telemetry for you. The app is actually good. Which I don't say about many apps. It's certainly much, much better than the Apple Health app.
I don't consider the data to be super accurate (I haven't put it against any professional monitoring tech), it's all about relative changes to your vitals over time imho. I had no idea where my physiology was before, now I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. As someone approaching 50 it's nice to confirm that I'm not dying yet ;)
I have pre-ordered an Oura Ring 4, even though the improvements seem relatively minimal, mostly because they're just useful enough and I buy into what they're doing and think they deserve to succeed.
I don't wear a ring, but I am a smart watch wearer: Longer term heart monitoring is useful for me to see if there's any trends I should raise with doctors.
Similarly, blood oxygen (very inconsistent measurements on my pixel watch), body temperature, and heart rate variability could also be useful to measure/trend
Older M, Oura 3 user since the pre-sale (2 or 3 years). Haven't looked yet at the 4 but suspect I will get it.
Two reasons. First- the best way to understand it, for technical folks who, say, operate software services- your main source of telemetry about yourself- more specifically, your cognitive operating capacity- is what's called interoception. This includes some more or less binary measures that your brain LLM has developed/evolved over time, as well as a bunch of qualitative factors that are themselves often an unreliable indicator of the "load" your "system" may be facing (from infection, injury, overeating, alcohol, stress, whatever). How do you "feel"? Eh, that's not reliable.
The Oura is a good enough quantitative sensor that conveys a number of metrics that are extremely useful in understanding factors impacting the "performance" of your "system." Overnight heart rate, temperature, HRV, actual sleep stages and sequences and times- it isn't obvious to someone if they haven't received this data, but once you start receiving it, it is tremendously useful, both because it is explanatory and because it is actionable. Life is a continual maintenance process and in the absence of that telemetry, you're going to be less responsive to certain categories of challenges your person is exposed to. The Oura has often picked up on or provided a heads up that my person was under load in ways I was not consciously aware of, and that has been helpful in allowing me to plan to, like, take a nap, to improve recovery, or pick up my exercise routine. When you don't have this data, you just don't know what you're missing.
The second reason is that the Oura business continues to work to deepen the metrics and the distillations in ways that initially don't seem (to me) to be immediately valuable- a newish metric called "resilience" is an example of this- but then as I follow the telemetry over time my mental model evolves to understand and identify what actual aspect of my interoceptive experience that metric attempts to quantify. This work is insightful, almost art, and takes judgement, and I have been impressed by the Oura team's decisions here. So I am happy to continue to give them my money- it is far more useful of a subscription than, like, $15/mo for Spotify.
I will probably get the 4- I assume that it will be a more sensitive instrument. Right now the 3 has some instrumentation flaws and limitations. It sometimes misses naps or certain activities. It only samples temp and heartrate once a minute. There is a fair amount of modeling on top of the underlying dataset. I imagine the 4 will represent an advance in sensitivity, and therefore hopefully an improvement in the models reporting metrics.
Hope that's helpful. Really is super useful as continual telemetry.
You can't expect the founders and investors to become billionaires with that attitude.
Why would they make a quality product for a reasonable price when they could simply become rich as fast as possible, then shutter the company, leaving themselves wealthy and their customers with useless devices? [0]
[0] Note: the people who have everything to gain by doing this and nothing to lose by lying, promise they will not do this.
Why would you want it implantable? I mean, I get why, but at the speed the tech evolves do you want to cut yourself up just to implant something that will be obsolete in a few years?
Implant doesn't necessarily mean full on surgery under general anaesthesia, it can be as simple as a small incision with a scalpel and local anaesthetic.
Not everyone's cup of tea but not as dramatic as "cutting yourself up" either.
When your in a situation where it is possible, just remove the ring for the activity. Simple as that. I had those concerns with my wedding band when I deployed back when I was in the Navy. I also worked a job where is was possible, like doing maintenance on a piece of equipment. So when I needed to do maintenance, ring came off, when the maintenance was complete, ring went back on.
Since it's pretty much just a sleep monitor, I only wear mine while sleeping, and keep it on the nightstand. Much much better than the Zeo headband I wore for sleep monitoring many years ago.
I mean I would not wear it while handling lines under tension! But if your job or hobby involves that you know without even looking that a fitness tracker on your finger is not an option for you regardless of material.
Was I supposed to know what this product does before reading this page?
I got halfway down where they start to talk about the sensors but then goes off into "The multiple sensors inside the ring form an 18-path multi-wavelength photoplethysmography (PPG) subsystem to provide highly accurate, continuous data throughout the day and night."
What does this thing do and how does that improve my health/life? Nvm I don't care at this point. I must not be the target demographic to wonder such things.
I'd be to pay a premium for a device like this if I wasn't limited to the manufacturers own app for collecting and interpreting data.
As is? Nah...
It looks like Oura at least writes to Apple Health [1], so there's some portability.
[1] https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025438734-...
It also writes to Google Fit, and Strava can see (some of) the data too.
So instead of Oura owning your data, Oura _and_ Apple own it?
Think of Apple Health as more like the Photos app on iOS than an online service like Garmin Connect or Google Fit or something like that.
Apple Health data are only stored on your device unless you choose to synchronize them to iCloud, in which case they're e2e encrypted.
Apple does occasionally offer the option to contribute to research studies, in which case they'd have access to the relevant data but this is an explicit opt-in.
All the Apple Health data are also available through HealthKit APIs so that they can be used in other apps, including various export apps (though export is also a native feature). Use of this API requires an explicit app-specific and data category-specific opt-in from the user.
All this is to say: I don't think it's accurate to say Apple owns your data in this case. Apple likes to put themselves as privacy-first and you may disagree more generally whether they live up to their image but IMO this is one of the cases where they've done a pretty good job.
Apple claims that Health data is end-to-end encrypted, both in storage and transmission:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111755
You can download all the data at any time from the Oura website.
https://cloud.ouraring.com/dashboard
You can export data from Apple Health to XML.
Completely agree. I have a Circular Slim and the device itself is awesome and some of the data visualization is pretty good.
I stopped wearing it because the app is so user hostile. The ring can't sync in the backround, so each time you open the app you need to wait 30 sec while it syncs. After it syncs there are a series of popups about coins, stars, and streaks. Then you need to dig through a bunch of AI garbage to see the data.
I just want to see my heartrate while I run and track my sleep. There's no need for so much gamified nonsense in the app.
I was curious about getting one of these things, and your comment prompted me to find this - looks like it's totally possible to collect & interpret yourself: https://github.com/Pinta365/oura_api
That appears to be connecting to Oura's servers, collecting the data they choose to share.
You are still at the whim of the company, who can turn off that data spigot any time it becomes expedient for them.
There's no way to get the data off of the device and use it yourself, without the same data going to their servers.
You pay hundreds of dollars for a device that doesn't let you use it, and rely on the kindness of the company to know your own heartrate.
Very few people want to interface with a wearable locally and store the data locally (esp via a mobile app given the use case here).
I have spent my entire career messing around with APIs and platforms and I have no interest in doing this DIY. oAuth into Oura ring's servers, which is totally available to you, is just fine.
If privacy is this much of a concern, why wear a trackable wearable in the first place?
> Very few people want to interface with a wearable locally
I think people WOULD like to keep their health data local, if given the option.
But companies do things in their own self-interest, including carefully crafted product descriptions, privacy policies, apis, protocols and apps.
I will mention Garmin watches don't require activation or to be "connected" to work.
That still requires going through Oura's API, which is where the second/third-party data collection happens.
I think the concern is privacy, not the user's access to the data.
You can export the data and analyze yourself- I do so with mine, but there is no open interface to connect directly with the device, you cannot avoid sharing your data with them.
I’m guessing this is part of their “startup-y-ness” that they need to sell the possibility of insane growth to VCs? Because just from an engineering perspective, I don’t see why it needs a monthly subscription to run a server crunching the numbers — couldn’t iOS and Android health apps handle all this data pretty well, with all-local processing? Maybe there’s more complicated ML pipelines involved in “adapting to your physiology” than I’m imagining… otherwise it seems like a random choice.
My second Oura ring (3rd gen) is ~3 years old and is currently collecting dust in a drawer because the battery lasts < 24 hrs, and If you forget to sync your data by opening the app (which can take a minute or longer of having the app open in the foreground) before it dies, it dumps all data collected since the last sync. Super frustrating.
I might be able to get it replaced if support decides to be generous, but dealing w/support is a pain, and the alternative is buying a $400 replacement every 2-3 years when the battery starts to fail.
I don't have to pay the monthly subscription - they had a deal where you could buy a third gen ring (at full price) and would get lifetime access without paying a monthly subscription. Despite that it still doesn't feel worth it to me to have yet another device I have to babysit (remember to sync with the app every day, remember to wear, remember to charge) and pay hundreds of $ to replace every 2-3 years. With the subscription cost, there's no way this product's value proposition makes sense for me.
I had the exact opposite experience with support, possibly the best one yet with any company.
I opened the live chat on the battery life support page and the chatbot asked (paraphrased) "Is your battery bad? Put in your email address". I put my email in and the next automated message was "Seems like your battery is underperforming, where should we send a replacement ring?"
I got my replacement a few days later.
I had the exact same pleasant experience. I had a Gen 2 ring with battery issues, and support was fast and painless with a new ring on its way in a couple of days.
Chiming in to say the same. Best support experience I’ve ever had with a company. Battery was lasting less than 3 days, talked to the bot for 2 mins and confirmation of a new ring being shipped was received a day later.
Same experience here. Support was effortless and new ring came quickly.
> Oura Ring 4 starts at $349, with Oura Membership pricing at $5.99 per month or $69.99 per year.
Oura business team forgot they now have much more competition than they had 2 or 3 years ago.
Competitor that doesn’t charge a monthly fee, and competitor like Samsung that will be « good enough » for the average joe while being cheaper and without monthly fee.
I don’t see how they can remain profitable in the near future.
In case by "competitor", you're referring to Ultrahuman, I disagree that they're a competitor.
Ultrahuman provides an overwhelming amount of information and a lot of useful-seeming recommendations on top of it but in my experience, the data collected by Ultrahuman are inaccurate to the point of being useless. For example I can be exercising with an ECG chest strap recording a heart rate of 170bpm and the Ultrahuman ring will consistently report 90bpm.
I haven't tried Oura personally (hard to get it in my region) but they do have a decent quantity of well-run studies to validate their measurements. Ultrahuman has close to zero validation. They do have their metabolic score feature that has some amount of proper validation but it's essentially a nicer UI for some very mature hardware from a completely different company.
If there's a real competitor without a subscription fee though, I'd love to hear about it.
I really like the Oura, and have had a 2nd gen which works great for nearly 7 years- battery still going strong. However the 2nd gen had no monthly subscription fee, which I really hate... I am not sure if I would be willing to upgrade, as I have a huge aversion to subscription fees.
Overall, I don't really like their software either- in my experience their 'sleep score' is in no way correlated with quality of sleep, just length. The main factor in my sleep score that makes it really high is having severe accumulated sleep deprivation, so I sleep longer. In my opinion factors like sleep efficiency (e.g. not waking up a lot) should be the main thing in the score. Ultimately nobody really knows what "good" sleep is- it is variable from person to person and can't be meaningfully represented as a single number.
I generally just pull the data into Python, and analyze it myself.
Probably my most interesting finding is the massive negative impact even small amounts of alcohol have on my sleep. Even a single beer 4 hours before bedtime almost completely eliminates deep sleep. I've come to the conclusion that drinking early in the day is likely actually somewhat healthier, despite being culturally unacceptable. I've also found that the humidity really affects my sleep - especially altering breath rate- but I'm not sure what to make of that.
If you wake up a lot at night and still feel tired in the morning... have you tried doing a sleep study? I believe that obstructive sleep apnea is severely under-diagnosed.
Yes, I did a real sleep study and they said I do indeed have "mild" sleep apnea but it "isn't bad enough that we are willing to treat it." I do usually need several naps to get through a typical day- and that is after identifying and treating three other major health conditions that can cause fatigue.
The newer Oura rings actually have an integrated pulse oximeter and can measure apnea, but mine does not.
I wonder if I should just buy a CPAP on my own and see if I feel better. I probably should also lower my bodyweight... I am a weight lifter, although fairly lean, I am a big guy, and losing some weight might reduce apnea events.
I did. Bought it myself. Learn how to enter clinician mode by holding the right buttons for your model. It's quite shocking how controlled and artificially limited things are in CPAP-land. cpap, and more advanced machines have identical hardware, but they cost orders of magnitude different prices. For many people have different pressure when inhaling vs exhaling is important - so called BiPAP. Everyone tells you start with CPAP, but if it turns out you need BiPAP then you need to replace the entire machine even though hacking the software works in, ahem, certain cases.
Thanks- how did it work out for you? Is there a more hackable model you'd recommend, e.g. one that can be turned into a bipap?
> I do usually need several naps to get through a typical day
If that was me, I would pester either the same doctor or a new one to get a CPAP machine. It's not a set and forget device, you may need to try a few masks and tweak the settings until you find something that really works for you, but once it's dialed in it makes a big big difference to your quality of life.
Trying to lose weight when you are not getting adequate sleep is an uphill battle. There are plenty of lean people that still need CPAP to get adequate sleep -- I was one of them.
I'll try but it is Kaiser- typically at Kaiser these judgements are out of the physicians control, they will fund a treatment only if you hit some specific number on a test- and it is virtually impossible for the doctor to override this- they need to get a bunch of signatures from other doctors, and use tons of political capital.
I have two other major health conditions that badly needed treatment, which Kaiser would not treat, and I paid an outside doctor with cash to be able to receive treatment.
Damn, I would really like such a thing, if it was just the hardware and not the associated lock in to a third party getting their grubby hands on my internal metrics.
I'd pay a premium for it even, which makes you wonder just how much money Oura must be making off the data of its users... (if they weren't, there'd be an incentive to sell the hardware)
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807567908753.html
You can get similar HW for $10-$15, and not the easiest hack but looks doable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w90RVspTkt8
I'm surprised Oura hasn't pursued using the ring as an input method as the guy suggests in the video. It'd be super cool to like double-tap the ring then use it as a scroll wheel when running and listening to music/podcasts, interact with AI models, etc.
Looks like those generic rings are supported by gadgetbridge[1] so barely any hacking needed for 100% on device processing and storage.
I have a miband I use with gadgetbridge. I'm reasonably happy with the app, and it has visibly improved over the last year (it also wins by default being opensource + the only option for keeping data private) but the watch is a bit bulky when sleeping or typing so I stopped wearing it.
I can't imagine $10 hardware will be particularly accurate, but cheap price + data control is enough to give me an excuse to play with one.
[1] specifically rings intended to be used by the QRing app - https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/wearables/colmi/
From all the alternatives linked to the listing it seems like it may be pretty generic hardware under a bunch of names. Would be interesting to see if the accelerometer in it could be used for gesture detection, and if the rings could be used for Bluetooth presence detection (e.g. for automatic screen locking).
> With scientifically validated sensing capabilities, ...
What does scientifically validating mean here? In my opinion, that just makes this article sound like marketing.
So, do I get any functionality if I just buy the ring, or do I _have to_ subscribe? I mean does the ring have any basic features that work without subscription, or do I pay monthly even for the basic features?
If it's the latter it's a big no.
You need to subscribe. It's $5.99/month. You get daily/weekly/monthly/yearly reports, and you can download all the raw data from their website at any time to do your own processing.
For those looking to the upgrade from a Gen 3 ring. I've seen some mentions that Gen 3 users might need to downsize for a Gen 4 because of less prominent sensors [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ouraring/comments/1fvytqg/sizing_ki...
$400 and a monthly subscription to a company that is known for only one product feels like a really shitty deal to me. I know people with various versions of this product and they do like it, but it's a hard sell for me to want to put that kind of money in.
I'll eventually upgrade my Oura Ring 3, but I'm irked about the need for a new charger. Yeah, it comes with one, but I need a second one because of my living arrangements. So it's another $59 because they couldn't make the new ring compatible with the old charger.
I've had mine for over two years now, and I've been pretty happy with it. I got it as an alternative to an Apple Watch for health & fitness monitoring, and it has turned out better than I expected. I think it's better than the watch in some ways, such as the battery life being long enough, and the ring being comfortable enough that I can easily use it while sleeping.
Is it possible to lift weights with the ring on? Would the ring not end up pretty banged up pretty quickly?
I have an Oura Ring 2 (now dead, not getting another one). Yes, it will get scratched up and you shouldn't wear it while weightlifting.
I'd be curious to hear from Oura Ring fans what they find so useful about them beyond the initial period where you get to diagnose poor sleep patterns and maybe a low step count. What value do you get out of it long term?
The sleep data is useful for fine tuning sleep. For whatever reason I don't see the big effects of alcohol that others mention, but I do see the effect of late day caffeine and also of stress.
The readiness / stress stuff is useful as well. Its better at picking up physical stress ( increased running volume, etc ) than mental stress, but its a useful feedback mechanism.
I'd love to be able to set alerts on specific measurements. Sometimes I feel like specific measurements are very predictive for me, but the rolled up score isn't as useful.
It's also able to tell if I'm getting sick a bit before I can tell.
I have an Oura Ring 3 and I find it useful to:
* Track my sleep (ongoing, not just initially) - My sleep wasn't as good as I thought it was, so it's good to try and improve my sleep hygiene. I like seeing how much deep and REM sleep I got the night before and my blood oxygen levels. The app will advise to take it easy if it thinks your readiness isn't good, which is a good excuse to chill out :)
* Daily slovenliness tracker - it'll remind me to get up and have a move around if I've been sat still too long.
I've started resistance training recently and it's good to see the progress before any significant outward physical differences appear:
* Track my workouts
* Track activity - its figures are a little on the high side for calories burned, but if you treat it as a relative guide, then it's useful.
* Track recovery
* Track heart-rate and resting heart-rate
* Track heart-rate variability
* Measure VO2 Max
* Track stress - I always thought my intense periods of work were potentially stressful, turns out they're not and I rarely get stressed!
I pay no attention to the 'steps' figure, instead the app sets a daily goal - based on your readiness - with calories burned (or sometimes it'll tell you to have some downtime if your body temperature is high, or your sleep was poor, or your recovery wasn't good).
The long-term trends it tracks are just good to see, as one of the other commentators said: it's telemetry for you. The app is actually good. Which I don't say about many apps. It's certainly much, much better than the Apple Health app.
I don't consider the data to be super accurate (I haven't put it against any professional monitoring tech), it's all about relative changes to your vitals over time imho. I had no idea where my physiology was before, now I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. As someone approaching 50 it's nice to confirm that I'm not dying yet ;)
I have pre-ordered an Oura Ring 4, even though the improvements seem relatively minimal, mostly because they're just useful enough and I buy into what they're doing and think they deserve to succeed.
I don't wear a ring, but I am a smart watch wearer: Longer term heart monitoring is useful for me to see if there's any trends I should raise with doctors.
Similarly, blood oxygen (very inconsistent measurements on my pixel watch), body temperature, and heart rate variability could also be useful to measure/trend
Older M, Oura 3 user since the pre-sale (2 or 3 years). Haven't looked yet at the 4 but suspect I will get it.
Two reasons. First- the best way to understand it, for technical folks who, say, operate software services- your main source of telemetry about yourself- more specifically, your cognitive operating capacity- is what's called interoception. This includes some more or less binary measures that your brain LLM has developed/evolved over time, as well as a bunch of qualitative factors that are themselves often an unreliable indicator of the "load" your "system" may be facing (from infection, injury, overeating, alcohol, stress, whatever). How do you "feel"? Eh, that's not reliable.
The Oura is a good enough quantitative sensor that conveys a number of metrics that are extremely useful in understanding factors impacting the "performance" of your "system." Overnight heart rate, temperature, HRV, actual sleep stages and sequences and times- it isn't obvious to someone if they haven't received this data, but once you start receiving it, it is tremendously useful, both because it is explanatory and because it is actionable. Life is a continual maintenance process and in the absence of that telemetry, you're going to be less responsive to certain categories of challenges your person is exposed to. The Oura has often picked up on or provided a heads up that my person was under load in ways I was not consciously aware of, and that has been helpful in allowing me to plan to, like, take a nap, to improve recovery, or pick up my exercise routine. When you don't have this data, you just don't know what you're missing.
The second reason is that the Oura business continues to work to deepen the metrics and the distillations in ways that initially don't seem (to me) to be immediately valuable- a newish metric called "resilience" is an example of this- but then as I follow the telemetry over time my mental model evolves to understand and identify what actual aspect of my interoceptive experience that metric attempts to quantify. This work is insightful, almost art, and takes judgement, and I have been impressed by the Oura team's decisions here. So I am happy to continue to give them my money- it is far more useful of a subscription than, like, $15/mo for Spotify.
I will probably get the 4- I assume that it will be a more sensitive instrument. Right now the 3 has some instrumentation flaws and limitations. It sometimes misses naps or certain activities. It only samples temp and heartrate once a minute. There is a fair amount of modeling on top of the underlying dataset. I imagine the 4 will represent an advance in sensitivity, and therefore hopefully an improvement in the models reporting metrics.
Hope that's helpful. Really is super useful as continual telemetry.
I refuse to even look at devices like this anymore after they removed features and locked them behind a paywall.
If you want ongoing revenue from a device, don't charge up front.
If you want to charge up front, don't try to get ongoing revenue from me for things the device does itself already.
You can't expect the founders and investors to become billionaires with that attitude.
Why would they make a quality product for a reasonable price when they could simply become rich as fast as possible, then shutter the company, leaving themselves wealthy and their customers with useless devices? [0]
[0] Note: the people who have everything to gain by doing this and nothing to lose by lying, promise they will not do this.
I'm curious to see how it compares to Samsung's Galaxy Ring. It's Samsung's first-gen model and Oura is on their 4th iteration.
Would be neat for a smart ring to offer tap-to-pay but I don't think it exists yet.
If I already have an Apple Watch, is there any point to getting one of these?
Some people find the ring profile to be easier to wear to bed than a watch for sleep tracking. And the battery life should be better.
But otherwise, you can't interact with the ring in any way. No notifications, responding to messages, podcasts, etc.
Is there much research being performed into implantable health monitors?
Why would you want it implantable? I mean, I get why, but at the speed the tech evolves do you want to cut yourself up just to implant something that will be obsolete in a few years?
Implant doesn't necessarily mean full on surgery under general anaesthesia, it can be as simple as a small incision with a scalpel and local anaesthetic.
Not everyone's cup of tea but not as dramatic as "cutting yourself up" either.
Good point. I guess I want more stats with higher accuracy without having to wear something.
You could get a suppository device
No silicone Oura rings? I'm not wearing any metal rings after reading about degloving and other horrors.
When your in a situation where it is possible, just remove the ring for the activity. Simple as that. I had those concerns with my wedding band when I deployed back when I was in the Navy. I also worked a job where is was possible, like doing maintenance on a piece of equipment. So when I needed to do maintenance, ring came off, when the maintenance was complete, ring went back on.
Since it's pretty much just a sleep monitor, I only wear mine while sleeping, and keep it on the nightstand. Much much better than the Zeo headband I wore for sleep monitoring many years ago.
Almost all of those are work-related or in specific activities like sailing. You are not gonna get degloved writing redux selectors or whatever.
> You are not gonna get degloved writing redux selectors or whatever.
Right, just buy the fitness tracker and make sure to only wear it indoors while not performing physical activities.
I mean I would not wear it while handling lines under tension! But if your job or hobby involves that you know without even looking that a fitness tracker on your finger is not an option for you regardless of material.
> You are not gonna get degloved writing redux selectors or whatever.
Made me chuckle. Watch me!
That's why I bought a smart watch with old LCD display - 20 days of battery at least
I don't need yet another subscription in my budget
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