Wearable health trackers are very popular these days, and I decided to get one. I chose to go for the Oura ring 4 because it has received good reviews. In this post, I will talk about my experience with it. SPOILER ALERT: I ended up sending it back after a month.
About the Oura Ring 4
The Oura ring 4 is an impressive piece of kit which can do many different things. It looks just like a standard ring that you wear on your finger, but it contains many different sensors that can track various things. Here’s what it can track:
- blood oxygen level
- heart rate
- sleep
- stress
- activity
- menstrual cycle
- body temperature
- Heart Rate Variability
The accompanying app uses all of the data to give you an overall picture of your health. It can tell you your readiness score, stress levels, and how well you slept, amongst other things. You must subscribe to the app to get the full use out of it, as it interprets the data and provides guidance on how to improve your health.
My experience
Sleep Tracking
The main reason I wanted to get the ring was to track my sleep, which is something that the Oura ring is supposed to excel at. However, for me, it never did this accurately.
Every day it thought I was going to bed at 5 PM and sleeping until 8 AM. Then the next day it would say that I had slept for about 12 hours and spent 15 hours in bed, which is ridiculous.
The ring uses motion detection, body temperature, and heart rate to determine when you are asleep. Granted, I don’t move as much as an able-bodied person, but it should still have been able to tell that I wasn’t asleep.
I could manually change the times that I went to bed the following day, but I don’t want to have to do this every single day. And even after I do that, it still isn’t accurate. It would tell me I slept well when I hadn’t, just because I didn’t move much.
It tells you how long you spent in different sleep stages and gives you a sleep score the following day – the higher the better. But I never had any confidence in the accuracy of this.
Activity tracking
The activity monitoring was not useful for me because I am unable to run or walk or do much physically. So there’s no point in it telling me how many steps I somehow took each day, which it sometimes did.
Another major reason why I wanted the ring was to track my heart rate when I was on my exercise bike, but the ring was uncomfortable to wear while doing this. When I hand cycle, the ring pressed into my fingers, so I couldn’t wear it while exercising.
Additionally, the ring is waterproof, so I wore it in the shower without any issues. I would have liked to wear it when I went swimming, but I never got the chance.
The heart rate monitoring was good and accurate, and I liked how it showed when I was stressed and when I was in a “restorative” period, which was when my heart rate was lower, I guess.
Aesthetics
Looks-wise, the ring is just like a normal piece of jewellery. You can choose it in different colours and I chose a silver one. It’s comfortable to wear, and it’s useful that they send you a free sizing kit beforehand so you can determine the right size of ring to get.
The App
As mentioned earlier, you need to subscribe to the Oura app to give you insights into the data it collects. The app is intuitive and easy to use, and it includes an AI which you can talk to about your data and ask it questions. It shows you real-time measurements, such as your heart rate, body temperature, and activity, which is cool. Each day will give you a readiness score which indicates how ready your body is for activity. Sometimes it would recommend you relax that day, depending on how well you slept. If it was accurate, then this would have been very useful for me.
The price
The ring cost £349, so it’s pretty expensive. The subscription costs £6 per month or £70 per year, and you get a free one-month trial period after your initial purchase. I sent it back and cancelled the subscription after a month to get my money back.
Conclusion
The Oura ring 4 can do a lot of things and is a great health tracker. But for a quadriplegic like me, a lot of its features are useless. Things like activity tracking are wasted on me. It failed at accurately tracking my sleep, which was the main thing I wanted it to do. I had high hopes before I bought it but ultimately I was disappointed. If you can walk and run then the ring will probably be good for you but for people like me it is a waste of money. I might look at different health trackers to see if they might be any better.
