I tested the Oura Ring Gen3, which 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.
Oura recently released the Oura Ring 4, which we're currently testing.
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I wore the Oura Ring Gen3 continuously 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.
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.
What is the Oura Ring?
Before the Oura Ring, most health- and fitness-tracking wearables were bulky wristwatches like the Fitbit or Apple Watch. The titanium, wedding-band-like Oura Ring is sleek and discreet. It’s worn by NBA stars to perfect their game (and, during the height of the pandemic, to attempt to detect COVID-19 outbreaks in the league).
Oura released the third-generation ring in 2021. The device shines light beams (infrared and red and green LED) through your skin and uses sensors to measure your respiratory rate, heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen levels, and body temperature. An accelerometer logs your activity and movement. The accompanying app uses the data collected during the previous day to generate three daily scores when you wake: Sleep, Activity, and Readiness.
Oura calculates your Sleep Score by looking at your total sleep time (including naps), your sleep efficiency (time asleep versus time awake), and time spent in REM sleep and deep sleep (the most restorative type of sleep). It also considers your sleep latency (how long it takes you to fall asleep versus when you go to bed) and how often you wake up and move during the night. Though not part of your Sleep Score, the Oura app also determines your chronotype (effectively, whether you’re a morning person or a night owl) and body clock (your optimal sleep schedule) after 90 days of using the device.
The Activity Score is based on how much you moved around the previous day. It includes how well you’ve heeded the app’s reminders to move (if it deems you’ve been sitting for too long), how frequently you engage in medium-to-high-intensity activity, and how often you meet your fitness goals.
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Your Readiness Score combines elements of your Sleep and Activity Scores to calculate your readiness for the day. In addition to sleep and activity data, this score considers your HRV (comparing your current week’s trend against your three-month average), skin temperature (unexplained temperature changes could indicate illness), and your recovery index (how long it takes your heart rate to stabilize during the night).
Each of these scores is rated on a scale of 0 to 100. Scoring 85 or higher is considered optimal; anything lower means Oura thinks you have room for improvement. You can share and compare your scores with friends via Oura’s Circles feature.
What we like about the Oura Ring Gen3
Oura has improved its sleep-tracking accuracy. Oura improved the accuracy of its sleep-tracking data with the third-generation ring. In a 2016 validation study (PDF) of the first-generation ring, Oura found that the ring’s sleep staging agreed with polysomnography—the gold-standard sleep test you’d receive at a sleep lab—only about 66% of the time. A 2021 validation study of the third-generation Oura Ring indicated that the ring agreed with polysomnography 79% of the time. Company-led validation studies need to be taken with a grain of salt, and assessing the accuracy of nonmedical sleep-tracking technology is complex. But Oura’s improved validation results suggest that their sleep data has become more reliable as the device has evolved. A 2024 study, conducted by independent researchers with funding from Oura, concluded that the Oura Ring “did not significantly differ from PSG for the measures time in bed, total sleep time, sleep onset latency, sleep period time, wake after sleep onset, time spent in light sleep, and time spent in deep sleep.”
The data is easy to read and digest. The Oura Ring, like many fitness wearables, throws a lot of data at you in the form of color-coded charts and graphs. It can seem overwhelming at first, but the weekly, monthly and quarterly reports synthesize all of your information into easy-to-understand language. I could typically interpret my data and the app’s recommendations at a glance.
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