OURA is a wearable ring that promises to help give you the best sleep of your life. Here’s our OURA ring review.
What is OURA?
OURA Ring describes itself as “a revolutionary ring-sized wellness computer that helps you sleep and perform better”.
The ring made headlines at CES 2016 for winning an Innovation Award. The company initially launched its ring on Kickstarter back in 2015, beating its goal of $100,000 with a total of over $650,000 in funding.
Your fingers are filled with easy-to-sense arteries. OURA takes advantage of this fact, using your arteries to track your body’s vital signals. Thanks to this more accurate form of measurement, OURA claims to do way more than just track your steps: it grows to understand your sleep cycles and your daily activity while also guiding you on how to be ready for the day.
The ring starts at $300, although you can get a “Stealth” model for up to $500.
OURA Features
- Sleep better, improving your sleep quality and maximizing your vital restorative periods
- Perform better, and understand when and how to train for the greatest results
- Measures and analyzes your body to learn more about you and your lifestyle
- Delivers clear textual message flow showing the trends, details, and changes to your lifestyle over time
- Collaborates with We Are Curious, a personal data platform and community that lets you share your sleep data with leading sleep researchers around the world
- Ring can identify deep sleep, REM sleep, light sleep, and periods of wakefulness
- OURA ring continuously measures your pulse waveform while you sleep (your pulse waveform is the exact time between heartbeats)
- Also tracks body temperature while you sleep
- OURA uses this data (pulse waveform and body temperature) to calculate your heart rate, respiration rate, and other parameters needed to assess sleep quality
- Wearers get a Readiness Score to assess how ready they are for the coming day
- Made from a premium ceramic compound
- Scratch-proof and waterproof
- Collects and stores data on-board for up to 3 weeks
- Automatic on/off, so the device knows when it’s no longer on your finger
OURA Tech Specs
- “High speed memory” capable of storing data up to 3 weeks without syncing to your phone
- ARM Cortex MO
- Advanced LED sensors for optical pulse measurement
- Smart wireless that connects and syncs with mobile phones via Bluetooth Smart
- Lithium polymer 40mAh battery
What Does OURA Track?
OURA separates its tracked metrics into three different categories, including Sleep, Activity, and Readiness. Here are all of the things OURA will track while you wear it:
Sleep
- Sleep summary and details
- Sleep trends
- Sleep score
- Lowest heartrate at night
- Sleep graph with durations
- Deep/light/REM/awake
Activity
- Activity summary and details
- Activity trends
- Activity step count
- Calories burned
- Automatic and manual targets
- Activity in intensity zones
- Passivity notification (aka a sitting alert)
Readiness
- Readiness summary and details
- Readiness trends
- Readiness score
- Contributors to readiness score (including sleep, physical activity, and body responses)
OURA Pricing
There are different OURA models available. Pricing is available on the online store in Euros or USD. Here’s how pricing breaks down for the different types of OURA:
- OURA Ring Mirror Black: $299
- OURA Ring Arctic White: $299
- OURA Ring Stealth Black: $499
- Additional OURA Ring Charger: $59
You can select your desired size at checkout. You’ll also need to add shipping, tax, and customs/tariffs onto that order. If you want the ring to be custom-fit to your exact measurements, you can pay an extra $5 to have it sized.
Who Makes OURA?
OURA is a Finnish company founded in 2013. The company is based in Oulu, Finland, with offices in Helsinki, San Francisco, Boulder, and New York City.
The company’s first product, the OURA wellness ring, was launched in 2015 alongside the OURA app.
OURA Reviews: What Do Customers Say About OURA?
OURA is generally well-reviewed online, with various tech blogs giving it a rating of 4 stars out of 5 or higher.
Mobile Tech Talk, for example, gave it a score of 8.8 out of 10, praising OURA for its “awesome build quality and design” and the fact that you can get lots of nice insight into your daily activities.
The main downsides, according to those reviews, was the high price tag: considering FitBit fitness trackers cost about half the price of OURA, you’re paying a bit of a price premium.
TechRadar similarly praised OURA for being subtler than a FitBit, and more appropriate to wear in professional sittings. However, the writer claimed the large size of the ring made it a bit uncomfortable to wear at first (the modern versions of OURA are much smaller and more discreet). That being said, if you’re not used to wearing jewelry on your fingers, then OURA might be a bit uncomfortable.
Some sleep coaches found online also recommend OURA for their clients as a way of easily tracking their sleep and activity.
Should You Buy OURA?
OURA is more expensive than other sleep and fitness trackers on the market. However, it’s also uniquely stylish. It’s one of the few fitness trackers that doesn’t look like a fitness tracker: it just looks like a slightly-above-average-sized ring on your finger. That’s it.
OURA tracks all of the things you expect it to track, including your sleep activity and the steps you’ve taken. Many people have also come to rely on OURA for the unique measurement called the Readiness Score, which tracks how ready you are for the day ahead (based on the amount of sleep, your quality of sleep, and other metrics).
You can buy OURA today from OURARing.com, where it’s priced at around $300.
