Oura Ring: a ring to check the vital signs

The wearable technology is ever smarter, ever more efficient, ever smaller. The most famous and worn one remains always the smartwatch, however it isn’t the only technological object that you can wear and that can help on your daily tasks. Oura Ring is a ring that checks our vital signs, as well as a smartwatch but smaller and more practical. Let’s discover it together.

Welcome to the future

The company that planned and made Oura Ring welcomes you into the future. We all know the smartwatches and the fitness bands, but a ring! It’s such small and such efficient. The company itself says that it’s “the sleep and activity tracker”, and it seems to be true. The performances are great and what to say about the comfort to wear a small ring instead or a bulky smart watch?

Oura Ring can detect your heartbeat, the variability of the heart frequency, the temperature and it can count the steps. Furthermore it has a clean and attractive design; no one will think it is a hi tech object and not a fashion accessory.

The developers of Oura think that the smartwatch and smartband time is over, now it’s the moment of the smart rings!

The design of Oura Ring

Let’s start from the design of the smart ring, it is clean and minimal. We have two versions of Oura Ring: Heritage and Balance. The first one has a rounded design with a flat detail on the upper side. While the second one, which is rounded too, has a spiked detail on the upper side.

Oura Ring is realized with ultra light titanium. It is scratch and water proof, up to 100 meters of deepth.

The technology used by Oura Ring

Oura Ring isn’t thought as a fitness tracker, but as an accessory to check the quality and the quantity of sleep.

“Your trip toward a healthy life starts from the sleep. And a ring”

For this reason the ring doesn’t use the technology of the sensors with green light LED, which is used by smartwatches and trackers, to check the hearthbeat. But it uses the technology with infra red leds based on the photo plethysmography, to measure the volumetric variations on the peripheral blood level, in this case, from an artery on the finger.

Why should we check the pulsations from the finger and not from the wrist? “The doctors check your pulsations from the finger not from the wrist, why? Accuracy!”

Other functions of the smart ring

Besides the volumetric change, Oura even measures the HRV, which is the variability of the heart frequency. This value, even if it’s less known than the other, is very important to establish the health conditions of a person.

Low HRV values can be a wake up call and ending up with a longer time to recover from physical efforts but even from the emotional ones.

Oura then checks even our body temperature through the NTC sensors. The Oura ring is one of the very few wearables that measures the temperature straight from our skin and not by doing an estimate with the surrounding environment.

Lastly, the smart ring is equipped with an accelerometer, to count the steps and to calculate the burnt calories during the day.

Oura Ring day and night

Oura helps you day and night. When we are awake it catches the informations about the activity and the movements. While we are sleeping, instead, it checks our health conditions and the sleep. Specifically what does Oura ring check during the day?

• The activity levels;
• The steps;
• The calories;
• The rest time;
• The breaks.

And during the night?

• The heartbeat while sleeping;
• The HRV;
• The breath frequency;
• The body temperature;
• The phases, the time and the quality of the sleep;
• The night movements.

The application

Obviusly Oura Ring needs a dedicated application, which is downloadable both on App Store and on Google Store. On the application, obviusly, there are all the datas collected by the ring while we were wearing it.

So in the morning we can check how it was during the night and discover if we have a quality slept or  not. We can even check our health conditions in that moment, by seeing all the vital signs.

Prices and availability of Oura Ring

As we said Oura Ring is available in two versions Heritage and Balance. Both models, in the colours silver and shiny black have a price of 314 euros. While for the colour matt black, which is available only for Heritage, the price is 419 euros.

Recentelly it was added the gold version in the colours. Therefore, there is even a luxury version of the ring, with diamonds, for a price of 1049 euros.

This post is also available in: Italiano