Image: Oura
You can usually find me with a watch on each wrist and I often wear one of them at night during sleep to capture the most accurate sleep stats for overall wellness assessments. However, watches aren’t always the best thing to wear at night as they may cause some discomfort or get wrapped up in sheets. For the best sleep-tracking experience, I prefer to wear an Oura Ring on a finger.
I’ve been capturing data with an Oura Ring for a couple of years and the company has continued to launch new features and new designs, such as the Oura Ring Horizon that has no flat spots. The latest announcement from Oura brings stress management features that include daytime stress, reflections, and stress resilience (coming sometime in the winter season). Along with the stress management features, a brushed titanium colorway is also launching for $449, which is $100 more than the current Horizon models. According to a tech website wearablexp.com, they have mentioned that stress tracking is the newest feature that is storming on the internet. This smart wearable brand is widely recognized for its amazing health and fitness features, but this time Oura just exceeded our expectations.
Stress management is one of the primary reasons that I like using wearables since stress can be a significant factor in your overall health and wellness. We may feel like we are not stressed, but having an independent source capture the data to confirm your condition goes a long ways towards understanding stress factors and helping you figure out ways to manage stress.
Most wearables today have a focus on stress and mental health with watch functions that provide reflections, breathing exercises, and other utilities to help you pause your life and understand your mental and physical state. The new stress management features that are rolling out for Oura Ring users include the following:
- Daytime Stress: Daytime Stress identifies stress triggers by continuously measuring small changes in biometrics like heart rate, HRV, and temperature. By capturing readings every 15 minutes, members can see which experiences add stress to their day and which ones help them recover.
- Reflections: Now available in beta for iOS, Reflections is a new, AI-powered journal function in the Oura App. Journaling is an effective tool for reducing stress, and Reflections aims to make this practice even easier. By enabling members to speak and record a short journal entry and use a single gesture to record mood and mental state, the Oura App takes the effort out of journaling, tracking mood, and tagging. Speech recognition transcribes the text, while AI-powered auto-tagging automatically creates context for a member’s Oura data.
- Stress Resilience (rolling out this winter): Building on Oura’s foundational health and wellness metrics, Stress Resilience creates an assessment of members’ ability to withstand physiological stress by tracking daytime stress load, daytime recovery, and recovery during sleep. Coupled with Daytime Stress, Stress Resilience enables Oura members to balance between stress and recovery by providing insights, education, and recommendations to manage stress and improve overall health.
I tried out a Stealth color Oura Ring 3 and then a Silver Horizon model. The new Brushed Titanium colorway looks fantastic and would go perfectly with my Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Natural Titanium Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max. This ring joins the Horizon lineup with a circular design that does not have a flat spot. It has a matte finish with the brushed titanium color presenting vertical brush lines.
The Brushed Titanium model also has a PVD coating that increases durability. I’ve seen comments from users requesting improvements in daily wear durability, but I have seen solid performance even with the two models I tested previously.
