Bob Rudell
MinnesotaMember since May 2017

Reviews (1)


    • May 7, 2017
    • Verified Reviewer

    Oura Ring

    Activity and sleep data issues

    Overall Experience:

    I was a Kickstarter backer of Oura and had high hopes for it. Now that Oura has shut down their forums, there is no place to provide feedback directly to them. The biggest issue with Oura is that the activity intensity is NOT captured accurately; consequently, the Activity and Readiness scores suffer from "garbage in/garbage out."

    After a recent firmware update, I pulled my Oura out of the box to see if it had improved its activity monitoring. My data over this two week period with ten intense workouts (averaging one hour on an elliptical with average heart rate of 134 and average max heart rate of 161. I'm a 68-year-old male with a calculated max heart rate of 152) were all recorded as "medium" by Oura.

    Walking my dog for 20 minutes was actually rated higher on Oura's activity scale than my elliptical workouts! The Activity and Readiness percent do not appear to bear any correlation to the activities I actually engage in. The Activity percent was actually HIGHER on the four days I did not do my intense workout, and the Readiness percent was unchanged. Go figure. I cannot recommend Oura for anyone whose active workouts are not captured by Oura's accelerometer. It won't capture static activities like bike riding, ellipticals or even yoga. Dog walking it does capture!

    Oura fares better on the sleep measures which I compared to the recent sleep data added to Fitbit. Over the same two week period, Oura averaged five hours 35 minutes of sleep and Fitbit averaged 5:42 (I don't need much sleep).

    The breakdowns by Deep, REM, Light, and Awake time were another matter. Awake time was pretty equal, averaging 47 minutes with Oura to 45 with Fitbit, and Deep sleep time was not too far off at 26 with Oura, and 46 with Fitbit. The REM and Light sleep times were quite disparate; Oura REM at one hour, 55 minutes average, Fitbit at 1:17, Light sleep time was 3:13 with Oura and 3:39 with Fitbit. So the total REM/Light was pretty close between the two devices at 5:08 Oura and 4:57 with Fitbit. So there is clearly a difference in the algorithms used to track the different sleep categories.

    For me, Oura is going back in the box as it simply is a LOUSY activity tracker that gives bad data in its Activity and Readiness measures. And as a Sleep tracker (which was one of the touted features of Oura), it's data is directionally accurate but hard to trust since they don't provide any idea how it is calculated. I will rely on my Fitbit Blaze. It is a cheaper, better activity tracker with sleep data that is similarly directionally accurate.

    It's too bad. Oura is a great concept that simply can't deliver due to its inability to track the most important input to its data; the intensity of your activities.

    Bottom Line: No, I would not recommend this to a friend

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