Oura Ring: CEO Talks Health, Fitness And The Challenge Of Samsung’s Galaxy Ring

There are plenty of health gadgets on the market right now, and more arriving all the time. One of the latest form factors is the smart ring, and the Finnish company Öura is the pre-eminent of these. I sat down to talk to the company’s CEO, Tom Hale, to ask him about fitness metrics and how he sees the impact of the just-released Galaxy Ring from Samsung.

A smart ring has several advantages over a phone or a watch. For a start, it’s on your person 24 hours a day, quietly recording data. A watch might be on your wrist while you sleep, but a ring is much more unobtrusive. “Well, it’s a philosophical choice, “ Hale explains, “to be a kind of calm tech, it’s not constantly asking for your engagement. I joke that it’s not another digital mouth that you have to feed, and the truth is that battery management is different on a gadget with a screen.”

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Sleep tracking is key to Öura and Hale explains why: “We go deep on sleep. There’s a strategic reason for that, which is that the data that you’re collecting when you’re asleep, your body is in more or less the same physical state: you’re asleep, you’re in your bed most of the time, it’s a quiet environment with not a lot of light distraction. You’re not dealing with other factors like a stressful day or climbing a set of stairs. All these things that can confound what is normal for you. And it’s really powerful because as we track your sleep we can make comparisons over time, and what powers the insights is those deviations from your baseline, what’s normal for you.”

And the tracking that the Öura Ring does is quiet, recording in the background. “Passive tracking is the power,” Hale tells me. “I believe that in the future everybody will have a smartphone and then they’ll have some device on their body which is monitoring their health. I just think that is going to be the way people go through their lives because it’s too powerful not to know what your health condition is or if it’s changing. If you’re getting sick, you’re getting pregnant, whatever it is.”

Öura has something called cardiovascular age on all Generation 3 Öura rings. “This is a new feature we just launched which compares your cardiovascular age to your real age. What’s interesting is that the main way people have tracked heart health is resting heart rate. I think, you know, people started learning that if you had a lower resting heart rate, that was good. And if you had a high resting heart rate, maybe you should be working harder. But what is the moment at which you measure it? We look at something different.”

The metric the company looks at is PWV, pulse wave velocity, which is basically the speed at which blood is going through your system. “If your system is young, flexible, and healthy, it expands and contracts, so your PWV should be lower. If it gets occluded or less flexible, your PWV will be higher. And we’re able to look at the PWV for you versus people who are like you, same age, same background, and so on and make that assessment of your cardiovascular age. That’s something that’s really accessible. The thing is that it changes: it’s not a static metric like your resting heart rate.”

This is a new metric which, like others Öura has introduced, just pops up on your Android handset or iPhone. Some features, like Öura Labs are specific to iPhones. Öura Labs includes a capability to spot when you’re getting ill with Covid or other flu-like illness. An algorithm looks out for a break in trends and it can then let you know that you’re probably about to get sick. “Would we say you’re getting Covid? No. Of course not. Because Covid and a cold might show up the same way. But what we can say is, hey, you should probably change your behavior now and get more sleep, drink more fluids, try to take it easy. All the things that you might do to avoid getting sick.”

Samsung has recently launched the Galaxy Ring. How does Hale feel about this, I wonder, noting that he really doesn’t look worried that a giant brand is invading his patch. “I think it’s a huge validation for the category,” he says, “And I think it’s telling that it’s a smartphone vendor who’s leading with this idea of getting into the ring space. It has definitely improved our awareness and increased the amount of people who understand us, and we’re the leader in the category. The second thing is, we know how hard this is. We’ve spent 10 years not just on engineering, but of data science, and building algorithms and AI to understand and interpret so that we can present the right message at the right time.”

There’s a big reason why he’s not worried, I’d suggest: even if it’s highly successful, the Galaxy Ring is not compatible with iOS, so for the not inconsiderable number of people with an iPhone, the Öura Ring remains the obvious choice.

And while Samsung doesn’t charge a subscription for some of the features and metrics as Öura does ($6 a month), the Galaxy Ring costs more up front, selling for $399. As for that subscription charge, Hale says this: “The reality is that it’s a very modest amount of money to pay for your health. And what we see in our retention rates and in our customer satisfaction metrics is that people get so much value out of this. They change their behavior. They drink less. They go to bed earlier. They eat their meals earlier in the day. They’re much more mindful about their health, and the value of that is incalculable.”

No CEO will talk about the roadmap for their company, but I ask if the addition of new features like cardiovascular age means there’s still more to come. “This site on the human body, the finger, is a really great place to measure, so there’s lots of things that honestly haven’t even been explored. We can see something which is called the morphology of your pulse, meaning the actual shape of the pulse. So, what information is encoded in that, that hasn’t been yet divined, because frankly no one’s been able to look at that?”

Again, Hale comments on how some metrics can be less helpful. “ If you’re looking across ECG, say, a lot of things can confound the data: what’s the environment and so on, but when we track overnight, we can see basically consistent features in your heart rate signal. And from that, I think we can extract some very interesting insights, because from the fidelity and the sampling rate and the information that’s encoded in that, we can actually define things. And again, it’s personalized to you, it’s precision, it’s your moment in time. I feel that’s a place where we’ve yet to fully explore all the opportunities. There are going to be exciting new things to come in the future for the Öura Ring.”

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