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Oura, the company behind the smart ring that allows users to track a variety of vital data, is adding new features around social sharing and sleep tracking as the battle continues between tech companies to land and keep trackers on consumers’ wrists and fingers.
The company’s new community sharing feature, which it calls Circles, allows ring wearers to create private groups where they can share readiness, sleep, and activity scores.
Tom Hill, CEO of Oura, said the feature isn’t about competition like other fitness-focused trackers or platforms, but instead about “support and empathy.”
“It’s really about sharing your data, your results, your gear, your sleep, with your close and intimate friends, family, your coach, your doctor; maybe it’s the husband checking in on the wife or maybe it’s your team collecting the data,” Hill told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Squawk Box Thursday.
Hill noted that the data being shared “is only shared with the people you want to share it with. It’s not a social feature where you post your results to Twitter, although honestly some people do.”
“It’s about creating a small, intimate group of empathy and support,” he said.
Close-up of the Gen3 Horizon Aura ring and its sensors.
aura
The added benefit comes at a time when “chronic loneliness is a public health crisis,” Hill said, adding that sharing this dataset could help “create a physiological pool of data that allows you to understand whether or not someone is having a really bad day.” Not only are we saying it, their body is telling them so.”
It also comes as the race intensifies between technology companies to enhance their wearable devices with more features and functionality as consumers focus more on the health and exercise metrics that these devices highlight.
in appleAt its Worldwide Developers Conference 2023 earlier this week, the company announced several new health-related features for the Apple Watch, including mental and visual health tracking features, as well as new cycling and hiking capabilities. It’s based on the features it added to the Apple Watch 8 last fall, which included a new temperature sensor that better tracks sleep metrics.
Samsung has also added new temperature sensors to its Galaxy Watch to track sleep as well, and Garmin and the alphabetFitbit has also enhanced their device’s sleep and standby capabilities.
Oura, which has broken into the wearable market largely as a sleep tracker, is rolling out a new sleep-stage algorithm that the company says is 79% consistent with polysomnography — measuring brain waves, blood oxygen level, heart rate and breathing during sleep, as well as eye and leg movements. – To classify sleep into four stages, which includes awake, light, deep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
The improved algorithm is the “largest sleep dataset in existence,” Hill said.
By keeping track of these different stages, Oura provides a wide variety of scores and areas for improvement.
“It’s not just about the amount of sleep, but the quality of high-quality sleep, and that will make a difference in your cognition,” Hill said.
Oura, a two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 showrunner that ranked 33 on the 2023 list, has sought to get its episodes into more hands with additional features, as well as a variety of partnerships. Last year, Oura partnered with Gucci for a $950 luxury version of her ring and recently announced a deal with Best Buy to be its first large-scale US-based retail partnership, placing its rings in more than 850 stores nationwide. It also launched an employer-focused wellness arm in February, aiming to work with businesses, schools, sports organizations and the military on health goals for their employees.
It sold the millionth episode in March 2022, the last time it provided a unit sales figure.
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