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?"
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’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.
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 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
* 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.
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 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.
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].
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?
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.
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.
$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.
ederamen|1 year ago
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.
underyx|1 year ago
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.
mikae1|1 year ago
As is? Nah...
squidgedcricket|1 year ago
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.
ValentineC|1 year ago
[1] https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025438734-...
bbor|1 year ago
UniverseHacker|1 year ago
generalizations|1 year ago
UniverseHacker|1 year ago
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.
david-gpu|1 year ago
aucisson_masque|1 year ago
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.
Youden|1 year ago
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.
loxias|1 year ago
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)
aeternum|1 year ago
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.
can16358p|1 year ago
If it's the latter it's a big no.
anonymousiam|1 year ago
jinwoo68|1 year ago
What does scientifically validating mean here? In my opinion, that just makes this article sound like marketing.
anonymousiam|1 year ago
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.
8f2ab37a-ed6c|1 year ago
louthy|1 year ago
* 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.
adamgordonbell|1 year ago
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.
bloopernova|1 year ago
Similarly, blood oxygen (very inconsistent measurements on my pixel watch), body temperature, and heart rate variability could also be useful to measure/trend
jonahbenton|1 year ago
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.
bovermyer|1 year ago
jerlam|1 year ago
But otherwise, you can't interact with the ring in any way. No notifications, responding to messages, podcasts, etc.
flutas|1 year ago
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.
margalabargala|1 year ago
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.
sahaskatta|1 year ago
kasperni|1 year ago
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ouraring/comments/1fvytqg/sizing_ki...
xhrpost|1 year ago
bloopernova|1 year ago
Rinzler89|1 year ago
karmakaze|1 year ago
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.
mthoms|1 year ago
jacknews|1 year ago
bloopernova|1 year ago
tcmart14|1 year ago
giraffe_lady|1 year ago
UniverseHacker|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
8f2ab37a-ed6c|1 year ago
jerlam|1 year ago
p0w3n3d|1 year ago
kimbernator|1 year ago
mindwork|1 year ago
jdm8119|1 year ago
[deleted]
aarestad|1 year ago
[deleted]