Can the Oura Ring predict when you're about to get sick?

Before Shyamal Patel had even experienced symptoms of his dental infection, his Oura Ring detected that something was off. The smart ring noticed data fluctuations when his resting heart rate elevated by 10 beats per minute from his average, so he called up his primary care physician. 

His PCP told him that his elevated resting heart rate of 63 beats per minute was normal and, in fact, healthy for his age, and that there was nothing to worry about. However, days later, Patel, senior vice president of science at Oura, developed the infection and had emergency dental surgery. 

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Patel wonders if the infection and the emergency surgery could have been prevented, or its risks minimized, if his doctor had investigated further concerns about his heart rate. "There was a risk that I might have permanently damaged some of the sensation in my mouth if [the infection] had gone on too long," he said. 

This is one of many health emergency stories I've heard when people talk about their experiences with the Oura Ring. Scroll on the Oura Ring Reddit, and you'll find stories of the smart ring waving a red flag ahead of pregnancy, COVID-19, or an autoimmune disease diagnosis. 

The smart ring is known as a sleep and activity tracker. Yet in the past few years, the device has evolved into a vital tool, perhaps even a physiological crystal ball of sorts, that takes a more personalized approach to monitoring health and predicting and preventing illness. 

The Oura Ring collects a ring wearer's body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen, and respiration rate through the sensors on the ring's interior. The ring disseminates this information through the Oura app, where users can view their sleep, readiness, activity score, and daytime stress through charts and historical trends. 

The ring also gathers other metrics that contribute to overall health, like heart rate variability, recovery index (how long a body takes to recover from the previous day's activity while sleeping), time spent in each sleep stage, sleep latency, sleep balance, sleep regularity, the previous day's activity, and activity balance. 

A device that monitors health data around the clock, and uses AI-powered predictive models for analysis, has the potential to detect physiological irregularities a few days before someone begins to feel symptoms. 

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In fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency medical workers wore the Oura Ring to monitor and prevent the spread of illness in hospitals, and the Department of Defense put the rings on the fingers of its Defense Innovation Unit for its Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure project, due to the smart ring's symptom detection technology.

As we move into cold and flu season, there are a few indicators to pay attention to if users want to detect or prevent the early onset of illness through the Oura app. Keep an eye on your body temperature fluctuations; anything outside a 1.8-degree Fahrenheit change during the day is worth noting, according to Oura. 

An increased respiratory rate could signal that a cough or respiratory infection is coming. Meanwhile, an increased resting heart rate and a decreased HRV could act as a bellwether for infection, according to Patel. Some Oura Ring users on Reddit have also mentioned that checking their resilience is one way to get a glimpse of their overall health. 

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Once the cold hits, Patel suggests turning on Rest Mode in the Oura app, which puts recovery at the forefront and deprioritizes hitting daily activity goals. He also encourages using the tags on the app to mark the days you've fallen ill, alongside symptoms like headache, fever, cough, and more. 

"When you start tagging, we can start providing more insights about how those tags are affecting you and what the association between the tags are and how the symptoms you're feeling might be changing," Patel said. 

Oura recently discontinued its Symptom Radar, an experimental feature through Oura Labs, that users could use for a limited time and provide feedback, ahead of a permanent re-launch. The feature works as a symptom-monitoring tool that's not too different from what Oura already does through its core software operations. An Oura representative confirmed that Symptom Radar will return soon but could not provide more details. 

Functionalities like symptom tracking could be the pigment that paints the future picture of where health wearables like the Oura Ring will go. The market for wearable medical devices, like smart rings and smartwatches, is predicted to grow from $91.21bn in 2024 to $324.73bn by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. 

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And while these devices don't intend to replace medical professionals, they're already diagnosing hearing loss (in the case of Apple's AirPods Pro 2), sleep apnea (in the case of Apple's newest smartwatch), or gathering enough health data to tell a user to visit the doctor (in the case of one Oura user who, on Reddit, said the ring helped them get an autoimmune disease diagnosis). 

"I know it's fun to track your sleep and activity, but my Oura Ring has seriously helped me through this challenging period of my life. It helped me get diagnosed (my doctor took the data seriously) and made me more in tune with my body," the user wrote in a Reddit post. 

Healthcare professionals work with metrics in the context of population norms, rather than an individual's health data. However, that approach can create gaps in spotting and preventing illness. 

"It's valuable to know at the population level what normal health looks like. But what happens as a result of this is... you might actually miss something," he said. 

"So in my case, my normal resting heart rate is 50 to 53 beats per minute, and a 10-point jump is significant. It means that my body is going through something that is putting significant stress on it. We dismissed something as perfectly normal without taking into context what normal looks like for me." 

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The US healthcare system's weak spot in preventative, personal care could be a boon for the private health tech sector. 

Empowering a healthcare consumer with personal insights into their health data as they recover from illness (and charging $350 for the device and $72 a year for the subscription) is a convenient business model in a country where a patient without health insurance pays an average of $407 for an annual physical exam. Suddenly, the personalized data approach makes a lot more sense. 

However, the Oura Ring's capabilities don't mean it should replace your doctor. Patel advocates for sharing the health data gathered by Oura with your PCP for individual data capture and preventative analysis. 

"Wearables like Oura are a powerful tool because they give you a window into your daily physiology and behavior at a resolution that has just not been possible until very recently," he said. 

"So, the question is, 'How do we change our practice of healthcare so your doctor is taking that information into account and approaching your health in a way that is partly as a coach and partly as a guide to help you stay healthy, rather than what we have with our current system?'"