As is? Nah...
I think the concern is privacy, not the user's access to the data.
You are still at the whim of the company, who can turn off that data spigot any time it becomes expedient for them.
There's no way to get the data off of the device and use it yourself, without the same data going to their servers.
You pay hundreds of dollars for a device that doesn't let you use it, and rely on the kindness of the company to know your own heartrate.
I have spent my entire career messing around with APIs and platforms and I have no interest in doing this DIY. oAuth into Oura ring's servers, which is totally available to you, is just fine.
If privacy is this much of a concern, why wear a trackable wearable in the first place?
I think people WOULD like to keep their health data local, if given the option.
But companies do things in their own self-interest, including carefully crafted product descriptions, privacy policies, apis, protocols and apps.
I will mention Garmin watches don't require activation or to be "connected" to work.
[1] https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025438734-...
Apple Health data are only stored on your device unless you choose to synchronize them to iCloud, in which case they're e2e encrypted.
Apple does occasionally offer the option to contribute to research studies, in which case they'd have access to the relevant data but this is an explicit opt-in.
All the Apple Health data are also available through HealthKit APIs so that they can be used in other apps, including various export apps (though export is also a native feature). Use of this API requires an explicit app-specific and data category-specific opt-in from the user.
All this is to say: I don't think it's accurate to say Apple owns your data in this case. Apple likes to put themselves as privacy-first and you may disagree more generally whether they live up to their image but IMO this is one of the cases where they've done a pretty good job.
https://cloud.ouraring.com/dashboard
Log in to Oura on the Web with your Oura account details
Select the profile OOTW profile.png in the upper right corner > My Account
Under Export Data, you'll find options to download Oura metrics in either CSV or JSON format
I stopped wearing it because the app is so user hostile. The ring can't sync in the backround, so each time you open the app you need to wait 30 sec while it syncs. After it syncs there are a series of popups about coins, stars, and streaks. Then you need to dig through a bunch of AI garbage to see the data.
I just want to see my heartrate while I run and track my sleep. There's no need for so much gamified nonsense in the app.
If you want ongoing revenue from a device, don't charge up front.
If you want to charge up front, don't try to get ongoing revenue from me for things the device does itself already.
Why would they make a quality product for a reasonable price when they could simply become rich as fast as possible, then shutter the company, leaving themselves wealthy and their customers with useless devices? [0]
[0] Note: the people who have everything to gain by doing this and nothing to lose by lying, promise they will not do this.
Similarly, blood oxygen (very inconsistent measurements on my pixel watch), body temperature, and heart rate variability could also be useful to measure/trend
Two reasons. First- the best way to understand it, for technical folks who, say, operate software services- your main source of telemetry about yourself- more specifically, your cognitive operating capacity- is what's called interoception. This includes some more or less binary measures that your brain LLM has developed/evolved over time, as well as a bunch of qualitative factors that are themselves often an unreliable indicator of the "load" your "system" may be facing (from infection, injury, overeating, alcohol, stress, whatever). How do you "feel"? Eh, that's not reliable.
The Oura is a good enough quantitative sensor that conveys a number of metrics that are extremely useful in understanding factors impacting the "performance" of your "system." Overnight heart rate, temperature, HRV, actual sleep stages and sequences and times- it isn't obvious to someone if they haven't received this data, but once you start receiving it, it is tremendously useful, both because it is explanatory and because it is actionable. Life is a continual maintenance process and in the absence of that telemetry, you're going to be less responsive to certain categories of challenges your person is exposed to. The Oura has often picked up on or provided a heads up that my person was under load in ways I was not consciously aware of, and that has been helpful in allowing me to plan to, like, take a nap, to improve recovery, or pick up my exercise routine. When you don't have this data, you just don't know what you're missing.
The second reason is that the Oura business continues to work to deepen the metrics and the distillations in ways that initially don't seem (to me) to be immediately valuable- a newish metric called "resilience" is an example of this- but then as I follow the telemetry over time my mental model evolves to understand and identify what actual aspect of my interoceptive experience that metric attempts to quantify. This work is insightful, almost art, and takes judgement, and I have been impressed by the Oura team's decisions here. So I am happy to continue to give them my money- it is far more useful of a subscription than, like, $15/mo for Spotify.
I will probably get the 4- I assume that it will be a more sensitive instrument. Right now the 3 has some instrumentation flaws and limitations. It sometimes misses naps or certain activities. It only samples temp and heartrate once a minute. There is a fair amount of modeling on top of the underlying dataset. I imagine the 4 will represent an advance in sensitivity, and therefore hopefully an improvement in the models reporting metrics.
Hope that's helpful. Really is super useful as continual telemetry.
* Track my sleep (ongoing, not just initially) - My sleep wasn't as good as I thought it was, so it's good to try and improve my sleep hygiene. I like seeing how much deep and REM sleep I got the night before and my blood oxygen levels. The app will advise to take it easy if it thinks your readiness isn't good, which is a good excuse to chill out :)
* Daily slovenliness tracker - it'll remind me to get up and have a move around if I've been sat still too long.
I've started resistance training recently and it's good to see the progress before any significant outward physical differences appear:
* Track my workouts
* Track activity - its figures are a little on the high side for calories burned, but if you treat it as a relative guide, then it's useful.
* Track recovery
* Track heart-rate and resting heart-rate
* Track heart-rate variability
* Measure VO2 Max
* Track stress - I always thought my intense periods of work were potentially stressful, turns out they're not and I rarely get stressed!
I pay no attention to the 'steps' figure, instead the app sets a daily goal - based on your readiness - with calories burned (or sometimes it'll tell you to have some downtime if your body temperature is high, or your sleep was poor, or your recovery wasn't good).
The long-term trends it tracks are just good to see, as one of the other commentators said: it's telemetry for you. The app is actually good. Which I don't say about many apps. It's certainly much, much better than the Apple Health app.
I don't consider the data to be super accurate (I haven't put it against any professional monitoring tech), it's all about relative changes to your vitals over time imho. I had no idea where my physiology was before, now I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. As someone approaching 50 it's nice to confirm that I'm not dying yet ;)
I have pre-ordered an Oura Ring 4, even though the improvements seem relatively minimal, mostly because they're just useful enough and I buy into what they're doing and think they deserve to succeed.
The readiness / stress stuff is useful as well. Its better at picking up physical stress ( increased running volume, etc ) than mental stress, but its a useful feedback mechanism.
I'd love to be able to set alerts on specific measurements. Sometimes I feel like specific measurements are very predictive for me, but the rolled up score isn't as useful.
It's also able to tell if I'm getting sick a bit before I can tell.
Right, just buy the fitness tracker and make sure to only wear it indoors while not performing physical activities.
Made me chuckle. Watch me!
Not everyone's cup of tea but not as dramatic as "cutting yourself up" either.
Oura business team forgot they now have much more competition than they had 2 or 3 years ago.
Competitor that doesn’t charge a monthly fee, and competitor like Samsung that will be « good enough » for the average joe while being cheaper and without monthly fee.
I don’t see how they can remain profitable in the near future.
Ultrahuman provides an overwhelming amount of information and a lot of useful-seeming recommendations on top of it but in my experience, the data collected by Ultrahuman are inaccurate to the point of being useless. For example I can be exercising with an ECG chest strap recording a heart rate of 170bpm and the Ultrahuman ring will consistently report 90bpm.
I haven't tried Oura personally (hard to get it in my region) but they do have a decent quantity of well-run studies to validate their measurements. Ultrahuman has close to zero validation. They do have their metabolic score feature that has some amount of proper validation but it's essentially a nicer UI for some very mature hardware from a completely different company.
If there's a real competitor without a subscription fee though, I'd love to hear about it.
Overall, I don't really like their software either- in my experience their 'sleep score' is in no way correlated with quality of sleep, just length. The main factor in my sleep score that makes it really high is having severe accumulated sleep deprivation, so I sleep longer. In my opinion factors like sleep efficiency (e.g. not waking up a lot) should be the main thing in the score. Ultimately nobody really knows what "good" sleep is- it is variable from person to person and can't be meaningfully represented as a single number.
I generally just pull the data into Python, and analyze it myself.
Probably my most interesting finding is the massive negative impact even small amounts of alcohol have on my sleep. Even a single beer 4 hours before bedtime almost completely eliminates deep sleep. I've come to the conclusion that drinking early in the day is likely actually somewhat healthier, despite being culturally unacceptable. I've also found that the humidity really affects my sleep - especially altering breath rate- but I'm not sure what to make of that.
The newer Oura rings actually have an integrated pulse oximeter and can measure apnea, but mine does not.
I wonder if I should just buy a CPAP on my own and see if I feel better. I probably should also lower my bodyweight... I am a weight lifter, although fairly lean, I am a big guy, and losing some weight might reduce apnea events.
If that was me, I would pester either the same doctor or a new one to get a CPAP machine. It's not a set and forget device, you may need to try a few masks and tweak the settings until you find something that really works for you, but once it's dialed in it makes a big big difference to your quality of life.
Trying to lose weight when you are not getting adequate sleep is an uphill battle. There are plenty of lean people that still need CPAP to get adequate sleep -- I was one of them.
I have two other major health conditions that badly needed treatment, which Kaiser would not treat, and I paid an outside doctor with cash to be able to receive treatment.
What does scientifically validating mean here? In my opinion, that just makes this article sound like marketing.
I'd pay a premium for it even, which makes you wonder just how much money Oura must be making off the data of its users... (if they weren't, there'd be an incentive to sell the hardware)
You can get similar HW for $10-$15, and not the easiest hack but looks doable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w90RVspTkt8
I'm surprised Oura hasn't pursued using the ring as an input method as the guy suggests in the video. It'd be super cool to like double-tap the ring then use it as a scroll wheel when running and listening to music/podcasts, interact with AI models, etc.
I have a miband I use with gadgetbridge. I'm reasonably happy with the app, and it has visibly improved over the last year (it also wins by default being opensource + the only option for keeping data private) but the watch is a bit bulky when sleeping or typing so I stopped wearing it.
I can't imagine $10 hardware will be particularly accurate, but cheap price + data control is enough to give me an excuse to play with one.
[1] specifically rings intended to be used by the QRing app - https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/wearables/colmi/
But otherwise, you can't interact with the ring in any way. No notifications, responding to messages, podcasts, etc.
If it's the latter it's a big no.
I've had mine for over two years now, and I've been pretty happy with it. I got it as an alternative to an Apple Watch for health & fitness monitoring, and it has turned out better than I expected. I think it's better than the watch in some ways, such as the battery life being long enough, and the ring being comfortable enough that I can easily use it while sleeping.
I might be able to get it replaced if support decides to be generous, but dealing w/support is a pain, and the alternative is buying a $400 replacement every 2-3 years when the battery starts to fail.
I don't have to pay the monthly subscription - they had a deal where you could buy a third gen ring (at full price) and would get lifetime access without paying a monthly subscription. Despite that it still doesn't feel worth it to me to have yet another device I have to babysit (remember to sync with the app every day, remember to wear, remember to charge) and pay hundreds of $ to replace every 2-3 years. With the subscription cost, there's no way this product's value proposition makes sense for me.
I opened the live chat on the battery life support page and the chatbot asked (paraphrased) "Is your battery bad? Put in your email address". I put my email in and the next automated message was "Seems like your battery is underperforming, where should we send a replacement ring?"
I got my replacement a few days later.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ouraring/comments/1fvytqg/sizing_ki...
I got halfway down where they start to talk about the sensors but then goes off into "The multiple sensors inside the ring form an 18-path multi-wavelength photoplethysmography (PPG) subsystem to provide highly accurate, continuous data throughout the day and night."
What does this thing do and how does that improve my health/life? Nvm I don't care at this point. I must not be the target demographic to wonder such things.