Oura Ring 3 at 6 Months: Life With a Wearable That Knows When I’m Sick

My wedding ring, dull platinum, sits on the ring finger of my left hand. A black ring, titanium, sit on my right. The Oura Ring has been part of my hand for over half a year now — longer if you count the previous version I reviewed. I sleep with it. I shower with it. I don’t think about it much. And sometimes that’s exactly how I like my wearable tech. The Oura ring is a lot of things the Apple Watch isn’t, and also has a few things Apple’s next watch should adopt next.

Then, almost every morning, I check a phone app. It tells me my Readiness Score. It tells me my Sleep Score. I stare at these numbers and a pile of data below and I ask myself, do I feel OK today?

The Oura ring is a weird wearable. It starts at $299 (roughly £260 or AU$ 445). It’s truly ambient. It’s invisible, in a sense. I don’t interact with it. It doesn’t have a screen. In a sense, it reminds me of wearables from a decade ago, like the silver-disc Misfit Shine. It doesn’t have a screen or readouts for me to study on the fly, but I still wear a smartwatch. In that sense, the Oura ring is already redundant. But it manages to do something that the Apple Watch, at least, still doesn’t.

The Apple Watch, and many smartwatches, lean on activity and “ring completion” goals. Walk a certain amount, stand a certain amount, do a certain bunch of stuff. The Oura ring has completion goals, but a lot of its daily metrics are holistic: Does it look like you’re doing OK today? Does that affect how you plan your day? The idea of Readiness Scores is creeping across the smartwatch landscape, but Apple in particular hasn’t adopted them yet. The Oura ring is proactive, with a readiness score that suggests ways for you to take on the day ahead. The Apple Watch tends to look back at how my day was. Fitbit’s fitness and health metrics have shifted more to the Oura model, and I expect others to do as well. Or, at least, to augment the experience with more holistic data. The Oura ring will flag if my temperature seems elevated recently, my breathing rate has changed or my nightly blood oxygen seems to have shifted or my resting heart rate has been rising or falling. This could mean I’m getting sick. Or maybe I need rest. Or maybe it’s just a false alarm.

The Oura ring is proactive, with a readiness score that suggests ways for you to take on the day ahead. The Apple Watch tends to look back at how my day was. Fitbit’s fitness and health metrics have shifted more to the Oura model, and I expect others to do as well. Or, at least, to augment the experience with more holistic data. The Oura ring will flag if my temperature seems elevated recently, my breathing rate has changed or my nightly blood oxygen seems to have shifted or my resting heart rate has been rising or falling. This could mean I’m getting sick. Or maybe I need rest. Or maybe it’s just a false alarm.

Just a few days ago, I got sick with some sort of cold and a fever. The Oura ring noted my breathing rate increasing overnight, and my temperature being higher. It suggested I switch to rest mode for the day. I took a COVID-19 test, but I didn’t need the ring to tell me that. (It was negative.) Still, having an app that’s aware that you might be sick can be useful feedback, and I’ve been noticing which stats change when I’m not feeling well.

In fact, my recent bad cold was a great test of how the Oura 3 worked to track my measurements. I’ve shared what the app showed shortly before, during, and after my bad cold. You can see some of the changes, especially in respiration rate, relative temperature, and resting heart rate.

Read More: Column: Reflections to rethink and relocate the meaning of International Women’s Day