Smart ring leader Oura plans international push as CEO touts new features and thinking on hardware
Oura CEO Tom Hale spoke to CNBC about the smart ring product category and the impact of Samsung's entrance into the space.
Samsung's foray into smart rings isn't concerning the boss of the product category's pioneer, Oura — in fact, Tom Hale says he's seeing a boost in business.
"I'm sure that a major tech company making an announcement saying: 'Hey, this is a category that matters. It's going to be something that's big.' I think it's probably helpful," Hale told CNBC in an interview this week.
"In terms of the impact on our business, it has made zero impact. If anything, our business has gotten stronger since their announcement."
In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Hale discussed Oura's plans for new areas of insight it wants to give users, how he is thinking about new devices and the company's intentions for international expansion.
Oura's flagship product is the Oura Ring 4, a device known as a smart ring. It is packed with sensors that can track some health metrics, allowing Oura app users to learn more about the quality of their sleep or how ready they are to tackle the day ahead.
Founded in Finland in 2013, the company has been called a pioneer by analysts in the smart ring space. Oura said it has sold more than 2.5 million of its rings since it launched its first product. CCS Insight forecasts Oura will end the year with a 49% market share in smart rings.
Competition is starting to rear its head in the space. The world's largest smartphone maker Samsung made its first venture into smart rings this year with the Galaxy Ring, which some analysts say has put the device category on the map and popularized it with a broader audience.
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What Makes the Oura Ring Different?
An Oura membership delivers personalized, highly accurate health insights through 3 daily scores: Sleep, Readiness, and Activity.
Oura is your personalized health tool — packing sleep insights, heart rate monitoring, activity tracking, illness monitoring, and more into a single (and stylish) wearable.
After all, personalization is key. When it comes to health and well-being, what works for one person won’t necessarily work for you. That’s where Oura is different: It gets to know your personal “normal” and provides tailored insights to help you answer key questions about your health.
What Is Oura Ring?
Your Oura Ring and membership work hand-in-hand, quite literally, to support your personal health journey.
The Oura Ring uses advanced sensor technology to deliver personalized sleep and health insights straight from the most reliable source: your body.
Optimize your holistic health and manage stress with Oura
With your Oura membership, your experience with Oura improves over time , adapting to your body. When Oura gets to know you, detailed and highly accurate insights help you to better understand your overall well being.
Finally, through your Oura App, you are empowered to optimize your daily routines and answer key questions about your health like:
“How ready am I for the day?”
“How well did I sleep last night?”
“How am I balancing my activity with rest?”
Is Oura Ring Worth It? Here’s What Makes Oura Different
Oura is designed to provide accurate insights without disrupting your life. With precise sensors, Oura packs state-of-the-art heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), temperature, activity, and sleep monitoring technology into a lightweight, non-invasive ring.
Accuracy Above All
When you visit your doctor, there’s a reason they measure your pulse from your finger and not the wrist: accuracy. Your finger is the ideal source for reliable, impactful data, and Oura leverages this reality by:
Measuring closer to your heart: While wrist sensors sit far away from the arteries on the underside of the wrist, Oura measures directly from the arteries in your fingers to capture signals directly from your heart.
Prioritizing the right sensors: Oura uses infrared light photoplethysmography (PPG), which measures deeper than the green light LEDs found in most other wearables.
LEARN MORE: How Does the Oura Ring Track My Sleep?
Taking your temperature: Oura is one of the only wearables that measures your temperature directly from your skin, 24/7. Temperature is one of your core vital signs and reveals key insights about your body’s systems including impacts of strain, illness, and phases of the menstrual cycle.
Maximizing data quality: Oura samples at an unparalleled sampling rate of 50Hz. More data enables richer insights.
Constantly validating: While Oura is not a medical device, its capabilities are near perfect when compared to advanced medical technologies.
Sleep Staging Algorithm: Oura’s research scientists developed a new sleep staging algorithm that achieves 79% agreement with gold-standard polysomnography (PSG) for 4-stage sleep classification (wake, light, deep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep). By contrast, most commercial wrist-based wearables are limited to 60-65% agreement.
Resting heart rate: 99.9% reliability compared to a medical-grade electrocardiogram (ECG) and validated against PSG. Read the study.
Heart rate variability: 98.4% reliability compared to medical-grade ECG. Read the study.
Temperature trends: Matches performance with research-grade sensors at >99% and measures temperature trend changes as small as 0.13 °C. Read the study.
Personalized for You
With each person comes a unique version of “normal.” Rather than base your averages on impersonal population benchmarks — like “hit 10,000 steps” — Oura gets to know you and provides personalized baselines and insights. Whether your sleep took a hit after a night out, or you’re prioritizing balance in your wellness routine — Oura helps you reach your goals by delivering the best 360° view of your health.
Easy to Use
Getting started with Oura is a simple process, and its small form factor and lack of a tight wristband ensure your normal routine can carry on uninterrupted.
Sleep soundly: You shouldn’t have to disrupt your sleep to track it. Without a screen or vibrations, the Oura Ring is one of the most subtle and comfortable ways to accurately monitor your sleep.
Keep your routine: Go about your day without having to worry about tightening a strap or packing a charger. The ring has a long battery life, is water-resistant up to 100m, and can withstand a variety of temperatures, ranging from saunas to ice
Integrates With Your Favorite Apps
While Oura enables activity tracking all on its own, it also gives you the power to integrate apps such as Apple Health, Google Fit and Strava that you already use and love. See all the current Oura App integrations here.
All movement counts. Set your goals and track your activity with Oura.
What Does Oura Ring Track?
Your body’s signals are wrapped up into three simple scores that help you answer different questions about your health:
Your scores range from 0-100 – each day, a quick glance at your scores is enough to get a daily overview of your health.
Your Readiness Score is your main score and helps you understand your capacity for the day, so you know when to push and when to take it easy.
Your Oura scores provide unique and personalized insights compared to other tools. Oura emphasizes key health elements:
They are connected. Your scores are connected – delivering a holistic picture of your health rather than siloed stats. For example, rather than set static activity goals like “10,000 steps,” Oura automatically adjusts your Activity Goal daily based on your Readiness Score. If your body needs time to recover, Oura helps you find that balance.
They celebrate recovery. While many tools help you achieve milestones, Oura emphasizes the importance of recovery — whether that’s celebrating the impact of taking a rest day on your body or flagging how a late meal delayed your heart rate recovery.
They help you monitor for illness. Oura can help you flag when something is off in your data, like an elevated temperature, and even recommend Rest Mode when you need it most.
They dig deeper. Inside each of your scores are additional tools to help you answer how your lifestyle impacts your sleep, recovery, and activity. For example, your Sleep Score might flag a poor night of sleep, but it also empowers you to see what elements of your sleep are causing that response.
Become an Oura Member: How Much is Oura Ring Membership?
With an Oura Membership, you don’t need to be a medical professional, fitness enthusiast, or yoga master (though you totally can be!) to understand your health; all you need is a willingness to listen and learn from your body.
The Oura Membership is powered by 24/7 monitoring from your Oura Ring. Your Membership allows you to:
Wake up to a daily report on your readiness, sleep quality, and activity goals for the day.
Analyze your sleep, with advanced sleep stages tracking and Blood Oxygen (SpO2) sensing.
Stay active with real-time activity and performance tracking, including automatic activity detection and workout heart rate.
Monitor for stress or sickness via heart rate variability and temperature trend tracking.
Understand key health trends and correlations, with weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports.
For new members, one month of membership is included. $5.99/month afterwards.