How Does smart ring sleep tracker Work?
Oura Ring: A Comprehensive Sleep Tracker
If you haven’t heard of the Oura Ring yet, you’ve probably seen it on someone’s finger. The tiny health and sleep-tracking device has been a favorite of fitness enthusiasts and celebrities since it debuted in 2015.
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Now in its third iteration, the Oura Ring tracks and analyzes a host of metrics, including your heart-rate variability (HRV), blood oxygen rate, body temperature, and sleep duration. It uses this data to give you three daily scores, tallying the quality of your sleep, activity, and readiness. It can also determine your chronotype (your body’s natural preferences for sleep or wakefulness), give insight into hormonal factors that can affect your sleep, and theoretically alert you when you’re getting sick.
I wore the Oura Ring for six months; it gave me tons of data about myself and helped me pinpoint areas in my sleep and health that I could improve. It’s also more comfortable and discreet to wear than most wristband wearable trackers.
However, the ring costs about $300 or more, depending on the style and finish, and Oura’s app now requires a roughly $72 yearly subscription to access most of the data and reports. (Oura recently announced that the cost of the ring is eligible for reimbursement through a flexible spending account [FSA] or health spending account [HSA]. The subscription is not.)
If you just want to track your sleep cycles and get tips, a free (or modestly priced) sleep-tracking app may do the trick. And despite some improvements, the Oura Ring struggles to track workouts, so if that’s important to you, a dedicated fitness tracker might be a better choice.
How Does smart ring sleep tracker Work?
As you close your eyes and prepare to doze off, your Oura Ring prepares to track your entire night of shuteye. In the morning, you’ll wake up to in-depth data that shows how long you spent in each stage of sleep, as well as a Sleep Score that tells you at a glance how well you slept.
Here, we give you a peek into how Oura’s technology, sensors, and design give it the edge in accurately tracking your nightly shuteye.
Sleep Tracking: Primary Focus from Day One
Unlike other wearables that were originally designed as activity trackers, Oura was engineered to prioritize accurate sleep insights. The Oura Ring delivers research-quality data and has been validated against the gold standard sleep laboratory test—polysomnography (PSG).
Oura’s design maximizes sleep data quality:
- In the Oura Ring Gen3, PPG is sampled at 50Hz, completing 50 cycles per second. (PPG stands for photoplethysmography, a method that measures heart rate, respiration, and heart rate variability at night.)
- The unobtrusive ring design allows you to measure your sleep comfortably, without bright screens or notifications disrupting your sleep.
- Oura’s accelerometer sensor sits on your finger, enabling highly sensitive activity detection for even subtle nighttime movements.
- The ring measures directly from arteries in your finger, capturing the signal as it leaves the heart rather than on a delay on the return.
- Oura uses infrared PPG which penetrates deeper than the greenlight PPG in other wearables.
- Unlike single-sided wrist wearables, Oura leverages LEDs on either side of the finger to prioritize the clearest signal.
Expertise in Sleep Data
Oura leverages the best-in-class sleep experts in the world:
- Oura is a company founded in sleep, with a dedicated team that understands sleep physiology and is committed to researching the science of sleep.
- Oura’s sleep algorithm was tested and trained using machine learning and contains multiple components, including bedtime detection and sleep staging.
- Transparency is key: Oura has published, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, the major steps and pipeline of their sleep algorithm.
Determining Sleep Stages
Once Oura has determined that you’re asleep, it collects detailed data to generate sleep stage graphs called hypnograms. Oura leverages your movement and changes in your heart rate, respiration, and temperature to identify the signatures of each sleep stage.
- Light Sleep: Muscles relax and may jerk, respiratory rate slows, heart rate decreases, body temperature drops.
- Deep Sleep: Movement is suppressed, heart rate and respiration become very stable, skin temperature is at its highest.
- REM Sleep: Body becomes immobile, respiratory rate increases, heart rate increases.
Keep in mind that even a basic sleep tracking tool can still generate a similar graph, even if it’s using more primitive data or fewer data points.
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Comparison to Professional Sleep Studies
The main differences between any personal sleep tracker and a professional sleep study are the types of equipment used and the number of nights measured. Although Oura has been validated against the gold standard sleep laboratory test—polysomnography (PSG), it offers the advantages of fewer sensors, more data, and objective analysis:
- Fewer sensors: Oura uses a simple ring design rather than the intrusive equipment used in PSG tests.
- More data: Oura allows continuous nightly data collection, offering a fuller picture.
- Objective analysis: Consistent algorithm application provides accurate long-term trend data.
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