What is my ring for? A bad night, a chatbot coach, and a pulled IPO
Last night my Oura ring gave me a 64. I slept 4 hours and 44 minutes, got 38 minutes of REM, and I'm carrying a sleep debt of almost four hours. By 2 PM I'd napped for 90 minutes, about 1 hour 8 minutes of it actual sleep. The ring gave me credit: Sleep went from 64 to 70, Readiness from 69 to 75.
I have serious nap skills, and my doctor friends are jealous. What I don't like is sleeping with a watch on, so an always-on ring is a much better way to track a nap.
That same afternoon, the Oura Advisor, an AI chatbot that reads my data, told me something good. My resting heart rate has dropped from about 66 bpm in early September to 60 to 62 now, and it tied that to squash coming back. Then it asked me what I thought contributed most. Good question. The ring can't answer it. I have to.
I like Oura, but I notice what I'm buying into. A ring that started as a sleep tracker is now a subscription, an AI coach, and, for barely a week, a company with a $15bn stock market listing planned. They filed to raise up to $2.2bn at $40 to $44 a share, then pulled it days later, citing "uncertainty in the IPO market." The CEO said they have "the luxury of choosing our moment."
The same article mentions an August class action claiming Oura rings can't measure sleep, because "sleep happens in the brain, not on one's finger." Oura says it stands behind its science and notes that, like other wearables, it estimates sleep stages from heart rate, HRV, movement, breathing and temperature. I'm no judge, and to be fair, any wearable does that. But the product I trust to tell me how I slept is giving me an estimate.
So what is it for? A tool for me, or a data business with a nice interface?
What the ring does well:
- It measures slow trends better than I can feel them. I didn't notice my heart rate improving. The graph did.
- It scores things like naps, which makes me take them seriously.
What it can't do:
- It can't close my laptop at midnight.
- It can't tell me why a week of estate planning, CRA payments and squash kept me up.
- The Advisor can reassure me, but that isn't the same as changing my habits.
And the part that really bugs me: Oura is discontinuing its web dashboard on Oct 5, according to its help page, and that's where I used to export my data. Oura says my data stays in the app and the Membership Hub, but I want ownership and control of my own data, and I'd rather not depend on a dashboard that's going away. So I'm exporting my entire history again anyway on October 4th.
I carry more gadgets and apps than I'd like to count: Apple Watch, Strava, MyFitnessPal, Zero, Headspace and Muse (the meditation app, not the new Meta AI). So here's my test. Keep a tool only if it changed something I did in the last 30 days. By that test, Oura earns its place for the trend data and the nap. Whether the Advisor earns it, I'm still deciding. Ask me in 30 days if it made the cut.