Smart rings are having a bit of a moment with the Oura seen adorning the fingers of celebrities and elite sportspeople alike. It promises the health-tracking features of a smartwatch squeezed into a much smaller, less techie device focused on sleep, recovery and resilience. But can it deliver for regular people, too?
Now several years into its third iteration, the Oura Gen 3 is the most popular smart ring on the market, available in a range of attractive colours, metals and sizes. It looks and feels like an attractive piece of jewellery, and is priced accordingly, costing from £299 (€329/$299) and requiring a £6-a-month subscription on top. Keeping up with celebrity crazes has never been cheap.
The smooth and light titanium ring comes in various colours and finishes and in two different shapes: one with a plateau on top and a more expensive fully round version as tested. A clear plastic inner layer allows you to see the impressive array of components, sensors and contacts, including three bumps that make contact with the underside of your finger to read heart rate and other metrics.
What’s it like to wear?
The Oura is quite unlike most other fitness trackers. There’s no screen, it doesn’t make a noise, vibrate or do anything visible beyond the occasional red or green glow of the sensors. You can’t pay for anything with it or get notifications. Any interactions are made through the app on your phone.
Oura wants you to wear the ring on your index finger for the best data, but there it strikes everything you hold and was particularly annoying when using a smartphone. Switching to a smaller size on the fourth finger of my non-dominant hand was much easier to live with.
Even so, the Oura about twice the thickness of a traditional wedding band, which meant it digs into the adjacent fingers more than other rings I’ve worn and takes some getting used to. The company offers a kit with dummy rings of the eight different sizes available, which you should wear for at least a week to really test the fit, as the rings cannot be resized.
Getting the size right is very important as it has to be snug to collect your biometric data, but you have to take it off frequently too. It may be water resistant to 100-metre depths, but the sensors need cleaning and drying, and I had to remove it any time I tried gripping or lifting anything. The battery lasts about five days before it needs taking off for an hour for charging on a little USB-C puck. On an average day I must have taken it off at least three times.
Sleep, sleep and more sleep
Oura’s primary pitch is effortless and thorough analysis of your sleep and daily recovery to provide suggestions for meaningful improvement of your health over the long term.
During the day the ring tracks your activities like any other Fitbit analogue, including your steps and calories, heart rate once every five minutes, stress levels and other factors, rolling it into an activity score. The ring automatically recognises activities such as walks or rides, but will only record workout heart rate if you manually trigger it in the app before going for a run and the distance tracked was way off. I got better results by syncing runs tracked through Strava.
At night the ring tracks your sleep efficiency, cycles, heart rate, heart rate variability and blood oxygen saturation, calculating an overall sleep score out of 100. It is on par with the best smartwatches, if slightly more accurate than most.
Oura’s strength is in its analysis of trends and crunching of the data for interesting insights. For instance, Oura’s “readiness” score combines various biometrics including body temperature and sleep data, to work out how well you’ve recovered from any activity or illness and how ready you are for another workout or stressful day.
The “resilience” score goes one further as a measure of how well your body withstands and recovers from physiological stress, calculated from your recovery and stress over the last 14 days. If you’re sick or burning the midnight oil for long periods your resilience decreases.
I found my readiness and resilience scores mapped very well to how I was feeling at the time, particularly when I was battling illness.
The longer you wear the ring the more insights it produces. After three months it worked out my chronotype to be an early evening type – a person who is flexible on bedtime but does not like early mornings, describing me perfectly.
Other interesting long-term metrics Oura has recently added include VO2 max, a common metric of cardiovascular fitness and cardiovascular age that is worked out from the stiffness of your arteries inferred from the speed that pulses travel down your blood vessels.
No other tracker presents your health data in such an easy to understand and interesting way, either daily or over the longer term with graphs with trends. Weekly and monthly reports give you insights into how you’re doing with suggestions for improvements. The “explore” section talks you through the various factors that impact your health, offering advice on how to improve as well as various guided meditation and breath work.
The app also offers “experiments” that challenge you to reduce something deleterious to your health such as alcohol or caffeine within six hours of your bedtime. At the end of the two week test it produces a report comparing your sleep efficiency and restfulness to see if it made an improvement.
The ring also has extensive women’s health tracking, including menstrual cycles and pregnancy insights, using a combination of biometrics such as temperature and sleep patterns. Oura also partners with various third-party apps, including Natural Cycles for app-based birth control.
Sustainability
The Oura Gen 3 is not repairable and the battery is not replaceable. The company does not provide an expected lifespan for the battery, but it should maintain at least 80% of its original capacity after 500 full charge cycles. It does not include any recycled materials and Oura does not publish environmental impact reports or offer trade-in or recycling schemes.
Price
The Oura Gen 3 starts at £299 (€329/$299) with a choice of two designs and a range of finishes. The ring comes with one month free membership subscription, which costs £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99) a month (£69.99/€69.99/$69.99 annually) and is essential.
For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Ring costs £399, the Ultrahuman Ring Air costs £329 and an Apple Watch costs from £219.
Verdict
The Oura ring 3 is an impressive alternative to a smartwatch for those that want to track their sleep and general health, but don’t want to wear a screen on their wrist.
It is an attractive piece of jewellery that looks like anything but a piece of technology. It has some of the most comprehensive sleep, recovery and health data available, with long-term analysis that goes further than other devices and is better explained, guiding you to make meaningful improvements.
But it comes with quite a few compromises. Not only is the ring quite expensive, it requires a £6-a-month subscription on top. It will technically work without paying monthly but only with limited daily data, defeating the point of it.
The bulk of the ring, particularly on the sides between your fingers, may also be an issue for daily comfort. And the ring simply does less than smartwatches that cost about the same and track as much or more – particularly during exercise, which i sone of Oura’s main weaknesses.
But the ring’s biggest problem is that it cannot be repaired and the battery cannot be replaced, ultimately making it disposable and losing it a star.
Pros: jewellery-like designs, comprehensive sleep and health tracking, great analysis of trends and helpful advice, easy to understand, five day battery life, 100-metre water resistance, effective alternative for health to a smartwatch.
Cons: expensive, monthly subscription, thick for a ring and can get in the way, physical activity tracking such as running is weak, doesn’t do or track as much as a similarly priced smartwatch
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