Listen to this articleThe first Oura ring was the first ever consumer wearable capable of measuring sleep quality and sleep stages (e.g. deep and REM sleep) at close to laboratory level accuracy – as independently validated by SRI International, among others.
Below is our intervew with Petteri Lahtela, Co-Founder and CEO of Oura ring:
Q: How did you come up to the idea for the Oura ring in the first place?
A: Our passion to create this kind of a product is based on our own need to stay balanced and well performing – in the middle of hectic business and family life. We needed to find a way to understand what we could do to improve recovery from the mental and physical load of everyday life. How we could help people to perform up to their full potential without compromising their health.
If you want to maintain and enhance your daytime performance, improving sleep quality is one of the most crucial parts of the formula. We are all unique and our lifestyle preferences, rhythms of life, activities, and other choices we make every day, affect our sleep. In other words, our daytime choices determine how refreshing our sleep is to our body and mind.
Through extensive research and prototyping we found the finger to be an optimal place for accessing comprehensive physiological data. The ring is one of the oldest wearable form factors and it snugly fits on your finger. With thorough design we eventually managed to fit a full featured computer into a comfortable and stylish form.
Q: How is the second generation Oura ring different than the first one?
A: Here are the main differences:
• Smaller – now it is in the size of a wedding band
• Better battery life: up to one week
• 10x more processing power and more memory in the ring for storing data up to 6 weeks
• Further optimized proprietary optical measurement with Infrared LEDs for even more accurate Pulse waveform and amplitude variation detection, and improved power management
• Improved body temperature measurement
• Enables more daytime measurements in addition to nighttime measurements
• Gyroscope for enhanced activity tracking
• Several color and design options
• Wireless charging
The ring is made out of titanium with scratch-resistant DLC (diamond-like carbon) coating and is water resistant at least to 100 meters.
The new Oura ring helps you get more restorative sleep. The new ring has the same sensors as the first Oura ring, as well as a gyroscope and an improved body temperature sensor and the seamless medical-grade inner molding is non-allergenic for maximum wearing comfort.
Like the first Oura ring, the new Oura ring tracks:
• Night-time ECG-level resting heart rate (RHR), Interbeat interval (IBI) and heart rate variability (HRV)
• Sleep stages (Deep, REM, light), sleep timing, duration and quality
• Respiratory rate, breathing variance
• Thermometer-level nocturnal body temperature deviation
• Chronotype detection and circadian alignment
• Movements and daily rhythms
• Intensity, timing and length of physical activities, including activity calories and total energy expenditure
• Inactivity and sedentary time including alerts to stretch your legs every hour
The three Oura scores – Sleep, Readiness and Activity – remain at the heart of the Oura app.
We have also added on-demand heart rate tracking for use during meditation and breathing exercises. The ring automatically tracks restful moments, such as naps and relaxing exericeses, during the day.
Recommended: Q: Tell us something about the technology behind the Oura ring?
A: The new Oura ring is a miracle of Finnish design. Despite its size, the Oura ring measures your body signal data with three types of sensors:
• Infrared LEDs
• 3D accelerometer and gyroscope
• NTC body temperature sensor
Infrared LEDs
The infrared LEDs of the Oura ring access blood volume pulse (BVP) directly from the palmar arteries of the finger, with similar technology as, for example, the pulse oximeters used in hospitals.
The light sensor of the ring captures 250 samples per second for a constant flow of reliable data. The ring detects the pulse waveform and amplitude variation, and exact time between heartbeats, i.e. interbeat interval (IBI). From these, it derives your heart rate, respiratory rate, and heart rate variability (HRV), sleep staging and autonomic nervous system balance and recovery related parameters.
3D Accelerometer and Gyroscope
The Oura ring tracks your movement with its precise 3D accelerometer and gyroscope. It automatically detects the amplitude and intensity of your body movement, automatically recognizes that you’re active and tracks the time you were inactive during the day. The 3D accelerometer captures samples at the rate of 50 Hz.
Body Temperature Sensor
The Oura ring registers your body temperature reading every minute while you sleep. It detects automatically the time when your skin temperature corresponds to your body temperature. By comparing that value to values from earlier nights, it indicates your body temperature baseline and any variations from it in thermometer-level accuracy.
Q: Can you give us insights into the Oura ring’s features?
A: The new Oura ring will ship together with an updated Oura app. The new app focuses on insightful and meaningful guidance. The improved insights engine – the driver behind the messages the app gives you every day – will be more personalized to you and help you spot interesting trends or changes in how your body reacts to your lifestyle.
Other new features include:
• Circadian alignment guidance
• Sleep improvement programs
• On-demand HR and HRV tracking for meditation or breathing exercises
• Tags and notes with correlations to sleep, readiness and activity insights, so it helps you to build deep understanding on how your body responds to your rhythms, mealtimes, exercises and other doings, and how to adjust doings to ensure more restorative sleep
With easy-to-read metrics and easy-to-follow suggestions for improvement, the Oura app coaches you on the best and most effective ways to improve your scores and build toward a healthier future with better performance. The feedback loop from your body’s recovery metrics, measured by the ring, and your opportunities to enhance with your own choices, continue to feed each other every day as you use the system.
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Q: What is circadian alignment and how Oura is able to understand your personal circadian rhythm?
A: We humans operate according to a circadian rhythm. It’s a roughly 24-hour rhythm that sets the pace for our bodies and minds. For example, ever wonder why we tend to get sleepy and hungry at the same time of day? That’s your circadian rhythm at work.
The new Oura ring is the first consumer-available wearable that gives circadian alignment guidance. By tracking your long-term data regarding your sleep, recovery and activity, Oura is able to understand your personal circadian rhythm, and helps you to align your lifestyle to it. For example, the new Oura ring will help you find your optimal bedtime.
Aligning your sleep schedule with your own unique circadian rhythm is very important for getting adequate amounts of deep and REM sleep, both of which play a significant role in your recovery. It also helps in avoiding sleep deprivation and different types of sleep and insufficient recovery -related disorders and diseases.
Oura indicates your optimal bedtime: the time when your body is most ready for sleep, resulting in healthy patterns of sleep stages and adequate amount of total sleep. Oura also guides you how to prepare for a good night of sleep in the evenings, several hours before you go to sleep.
Q: What’s Oura’s philosophy?
A: Getting enough restorative sleep every night has a profound impact on mental and physical health and performance. Your daily choices and rhythms define how well you sleep and the restorativeness of your sleep determines how well you can perform during the day. With Oura, you learn your optimal times to move, eat and take a break to get that restorative sleep and enough recovery from daily mental and physical strain we meet each and every day.
Q: Where can you get the new Oura ring?
A: The new Oura ring is available for pre-order exclusively at ouraring.com. Shipping starts in April 2017.
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