Oura, the corporate behind the smart ring that permits users to trace quite a lot of biometric data, is adding recent features around social sharing and sleep tracking because the battle amongst tech corporations to land and keep trackers on the wrists and fingers of consumers continues.
The corporate’s recent community-sharing feature, which it calls Circles, allows ring wearers to create private groups where they will share readiness, sleep, and activity scores.
Oura CEO Tom Hale said that the feature shouldn’t be about competition like other more fitness-focused tracking devices or platforms might offer, but as an alternative it’s about “support and empathy.”
“It’s really about sharing your data, your scores, your readiness, your sleep, together with your close, intimate friends, family, your trainer, your doctor; possibly it is a husband checking in on a wife or possibly it is your team collecting the information comparing one another,” Hale said to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on “Squawk Box” on Thursday.
Hale noted that the information being shared is “only shared with the people who you must share with. It isn’t like a social feature where you are posting your scores to Twitter, although frankly, some people try this.”
“That is about making a small, intimate group of empathy and support,” he said.
A closeup of Oura’s Gen3 Horizon ring and its sensors.
Oura
Added feature comes at a time when “chronic loneliness is a public health crisis,” Hale said, adding that sharing this data set could help “create a physiological set of information that permits you to understand if someone really is having a nasty day, they don’t seem to be just saying it; their body is telling them.”
It also comes because the race amongst tech corporations to bolster their wearable devices with more features and functionality is increasing as consumers focus more on the health and exercise measurements that these devices highlight.
At Apple‘s 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week, the corporate announced several recent health-related features for the Apple Watch, including tracking features for each mental and vision health, along with recent cycling and mountain climbing capabilities. That builds upon features it added to the Apple Watch 8 last fall, which included a recent temperature sensor that higher tracks sleep metrics.
Samsung also added recent temperature sensors to its Galaxy watch to trace sleep as well, and Garmin and Alphabet‘s Fitbit have also boosted their devices’ capabilities around sleep and readiness.
Oura, which broke into the wearables market largely as a sleep tracker, is rolling out a recent sleep staging algorithm which the corporate says is in 79% agreement with polysomnography — the measurement of brain waves, the oxygen level in your blood, and heart rate and respiratory during sleep, in addition to eye and leg movements — for 4-stage sleep classification, which incorporates wake, light, deep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Hale said the improved algorithm is “the biggest dataset of sleep in existence.”
By tracking these various stages, the Oura app provides quite a lot of scores and areas for improvement.
“It isn’t just in regards to the quantity of sleep, but the standard, high-quality sleep, and that can make a difference in your cognition,” Hale said.
Oura, a two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company that ranked No. 33 on the 2023 list, has looked to get its rings onto more hands through added features, in addition to quite a lot of partnerships. Last yr, Oura partnered with Gucci for a $950 luxury version of its ring and recently announced a take care of Best Buy to be its first U.S.-based large-scale retail partnership, putting its rings in greater than 850 stores across the country. It also launched an employer-focused wellness arm in February, aiming to work with corporations, schools, sports organizations, and the military around health goals for his or her employees.
It sold its millionth ring in March 2022, the last time it provided a unit sales figure.
