Can the Oura ring predict when you are about to get sick?

Before Shyamal Patel had even experienced symptoms of his dental infection, he was Oura ring discovered that something was wrong. The smart ring noticed fluctuations in the data when his resting heart rate increased 10 beats per minute above his average, so he called his doctor.

His PCP told him that his elevated resting heart rate of 63 beats per minute was normal and even healthy for his age, and that there was nothing to worry about. Days later, however, Patel, senior vice president of science at Oura, contracted the infection and had to undergo emergency surgery.

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Patel wonders whether the infection and emergency surgery could have been prevented, or its risks minimized, if his doctor had investigated further concerns about his heart rate. “There was a risk that I might have permanently damaged some of the feeling in my mouth if (the infection) had gone on too long,” he said.

This is one of many stories of healthcare emergencies I’ve heard when people talk about their experiences with the Oura ring. Scroll through the Oura Ring Reddit and you’ll find stories about the smart ring waving a red flag ahead of pregnancy, COVID-19, or an autoimmune disease diagnosis.

The smart ring is known as a sleep and activity tracker. Yet in recent years the device has emerged as an essential tool, perhaps even a kind of physiological crystal ball, that takes a more personalized approach to monitoring health and predicting and preventing disease.

The Oura ring collects a ring wearer’s body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen and breathing rate through the sensors inside the ring. The ring distributes this information through the Oura app, where users can view their sleep, readiness, activity score, and daytime stress through graphs and historical trends.

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

A device that monitors health data 24 hours a day and uses AI-powered predictive models for analysis has the potential to detect physiological irregularities a few days before a person starts feeling symptoms.

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In fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic medical workers wore the Oura ring to monitor and prevent the spread of disease in hospitals, and the Ministry of Defense placed the rings on the fingers of its Defense Innovation Unit for its Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure project, thanks to the smart ring’s symptom detection technology.

As we enter cold and flu season, there are a number of indicators to look out for as users look to detect or prevent early onset of illness through the Oura app. Monitor your body temperature fluctuations; anything beyond a change of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit during the day is worth noting, according to Oura.

An increased respiratory rate can be a signal that a cough or respiratory infection is on the way. Meanwhile, increased resting heart rate and decreased HRV could act as an indicator of infection, according to Patel. Some Oura Ring users on Reddit have also said that checking their resilience is a way to get a glimpse into their overall health.

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Once the cold hits, Patel suggests turning on Rest Mode in the Oura app, which puts recovery at the forefront and de-prioritizes hitting daily activity goals. He also encourages using the tags in the app to mark the days you got sick, in addition to symptoms like headache, fever, cough and more.

“When you start tagging, we can provide more insight into how those tags affect you and what the association between the tags is and how the symptoms you feel may change,” Patel said.

Oura recently stopped using it Symptom radaran experimental feature through Oura Labs, which users could use and provide feedback for a limited time, prior to a permanent relaunch. The feature works as a symptom monitoring tool not much different from what Oura already does through its core software business. An Oura representative confirmed that Symptom Radar will be returning soon, but could not provide more details.

Features like symptom tracking could be the pigment that paints the future picture of where health wearables like the Oura Ring will go. The market for wearable medical devices, such as smart rings and smartwatches, is expected to grow from $91.21 billion in 2024 to $324.73 billion in 2032. Fortune business insights.

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And while these devices are not intended to replace medical professionals, they already diagnose hearing loss (in the case of Apple’s AirPods Pro 2), sleep apnea (in the case of The latest smartwatch from Apple), or collect enough health data to tell a user to visit the doctor (in the case of an Oura user who said on Reddit that the ring helped them diagnose an autoimmune disease).

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

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

“It’s valuable to know at a population level what normal health looks like. But what happens as a result is you may miss 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. It means my body is going through something that’s putting significant stress on it. We’ve dismissed something as perfectly normal without to put into context what normal looks like to me.”

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The U.S. health care system’s weakness in preventative, personalized care could be a boon to the private health care sector.

Providing a healthcare consumer with personalized insight into their health data while recovering from an illness (and charging $350 for the device and $72 per year for the subscription) is a useful business model in a country where a patient without health insurance averages $ $407 for an annual physical exam. Suddenly the personalized data approach makes a lot more sense.

However, the capabilities of the Oura Ring do not mean that it should replace your doctor. Patel advocates sharing the health data collected by Oura with your PCP for individual data collection and preventive analysis.

“Wearables like Oura are a powerful tool because they give you insight into your daily physiology and behavior with a solution 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 in a way that is part coach and part guide to help you stay healthy, rather than what we have with our current system?’”