Can the Oura Ring predict when you’ll get sick?

Before Shyamal Patel even experienced the symptoms of a tooth infection, Oura Ring He detected something was wrong. smart ring She noticed fluctuations in the data when her resting heart rate increased by 10 beats per minute from average, so she called her primary care doctor.

Her PCP told her that her high resting heart rate of 63 beats per minute was normal and that she was actually healthy for her age and nothing to worry about. But days later, Patel, Oura’s senior vice president of science, developed an infection and underwent emergency dental surgery.

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Patel wonders whether the infection and emergency surgery could have been prevented or the risks minimized if his doctor had investigated his concerns about his heart rate. “If (the infection) had lasted too long, I was at risk of permanently damaging some of the feeling in my mouth,” he said.

This is one of the many emergency stories I hear as people describe their experiences with the Oura Ring. Scroll through Oura Ring Reddit and you’ll find stories about the smart ring raising a red flag ahead of pregnancy, COVID-19, or an autoimmune disease diagnosis.

The smart ring is known as sleep and activity tracking. But over the past few years, the device has evolved into a vital tool, perhaps even a physiological crystal ball of sorts, that takes a more personalized approach to monitoring health and predicting and preventing disease.

The Oura Ring collects the wearer’s body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen and respiratory rate through sensors on the inside of the ring. The public disseminates this information through the Oura app, where users can view their sleep, readiness, activity scores, and daytime stress through graphs and historical trends.

The ring also collects other metrics that contribute to overall health, such as heart rate variability, recovery index (how long it takes the body to recover from the previous day’s activity while sleeping), time spent in each sleep stage, sleep latency, sleep balance, sleep loss, and sleep. regularity, previous day’s activity and activity balance.

A device that monitors health data around the clock and uses AI-powered predictive models for analysis has the potential to detect physiological irregularities several days before a person begins to feel symptoms.

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In fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency healthcare workers He wore the Oura Ring to monitor and prevent the spread of diseases in hospitals and Department of Defense Thanks to the smart ring’s symptom detection technology, the Defense Innovation Unit put rings on its fingers for the Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure project.

As we head into cold and flu season, there are a few indicators users should pay attention to whether they want to detect or prevent the early onset of illness through the Oura app. Pay attention to fluctuations in your body temperature; Any change beyond 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit during the day is significant, According to Oura.

Increased breathing rate may signal an impending cough or respiratory infection. Meanwhile, according to Patel, increased resting heart rate and decreased HRV can serve as precursors to infection. Some Oura Ring users on Reddit also noted that checking their stamina is a way to keep an eye on their overall health.

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When the cold hits, Patel recommends turning on rest mode on the Oura app; this prioritizes rest and deprioritizes meeting daily activity goals. It also encourages you to use tags in the app to mark days you got sick, as well as symptoms like headache, fever, cough, and more.

“Once you start labeling, we can begin to provide more information about how those labels affect you, what the relationship is between the labels, and how the symptoms you feel may change,” Patel said.

Oura recently stopped production Signature RadarAn experimental feature through Oura Labs that users can use for a limited time and provide feedback before a permanent relaunch. The feature works as a symptom monitoring tool, not too different from what Oura already does in its core software operations. An Oura representative confirmed that Symptom Radar would return soon but was unable to provide further details.

Functions like symptom tracking could be the pigment that paints the picture of where wearable health products like the Oura Ring will go in the future. The market for wearable medical devices such as smart rings and smartwatches is estimated to grow from $91.21 billion in 2024 to $324.73 billion by 2032. Fortune Business Insights.

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Although these devices are not intended to replace medical professionals, they already diagnose hearing loss (e.g. Apple’s AirPods Pro 2), sleep apnea (in case of) Apple’s newest smart watch) or collecting enough health data to tell a user to see a doctor (in the case of one Oura user on Reddit who said the ring helped him diagnose an autoimmune disease).

“I know it’s fun to track your sleep and activity, but my Oura Ring seriously helped me during this challenging time in my life. It helped me get diagnosed (my doctor took the data seriously) and helped me become more in tune with my body,” user wrote in a Reddit post.

Health professionals work with metrics in the context of population norms rather than an individual’s health data. However, this approach may create gaps in disease detection and prevention.

“It’s valuable to know at the population level what normal health looks like. But what happens as a result of that is you may actually be missing something,” he said.

“So in my case, my normal resting heart rate is 50 to 53 beats per minute, and a 10-point jump is significant. This means my body is going through a process that creates serious stress. We’ve overlooked something that’s perfectly fine considering the context of what normal looks like for me.” It’s normal without taking it.”

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The U.S. healthcare system’s soft spot for preventive, self-care could be a boon for the private health tech industry.

Providing the healthcare consumer with personal information about their health while they are recovering from illness (and charging $350 per year for the device and $72 per year for the subscription) is a viable business model in a country where a patient without health insurance pays an average of $200 million. $407 for annual physical exam. Suddenly the personalized data approach makes a lot more sense.

But the Oura Ring’s capabilities don’t mean it should replace your doctor. Patel advocates sharing health data collected by Oura with your PCP for individual data capture and preventative analysis.

“Wearable devices like Oura are a powerful tool because they give you a window into your daily physiology and behavior at a resolution that wasn’t possible until recently,” he said.

“So the question is, ‘How do we change our health care practice so that your doctor takes that information into account and approaches your health partly as a coach and partly as a guide to help you stay healthy more than we have in our current system?’