As I sit with Oura CEO Tom Hale in a quiet wooden booth on the sidelines of the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, I notice he’s wearing two smart rings. Do you do competitive analysis? No, as it turns out. Both rings are in-house units.
One of these, he explains, is his personal ring, which contains all his data from the past four years. The other is linked to your beta account and shows you what’s new in the next software update.
By wearing two rings running two sets of software, Hale can stay in touch with any changes in data, no matter how small. This kind of hyper-focus, essential to his work at the world’s largest maker of smart rings, allows him to understand the evolution of Oura’s customer experience before they do.
But high alert isn’t what you want for the rest of us. Other.
“Our philosophy is to stay in the background,” says Hale. “We consider ourselves quiet engineers.”
Calm Tech is different from most other wearables on the market and seems to be gaining ground. Smart rings that mainly measure activity and sleep have become increasingly popular in the past year. Sales have more than doubled to 1.8 million units by 2024 and are expected to reach around 4 million units this year. My God.
Many of us prefer this. best fitness trackers. Smart rings accounted for 75% of all fitness tracker sales in the US this year, up from 46% last year. approx.
Unlike traditional fitness trackers, smart rings cannot provide real-time information, statistics or exercise on your wrist. Instead, they record and summarize your activity and sleep data so you can view them later on your phone. This is enough for most people. The trade-off is especially true for those of us who have a less anxious attachment style with our personal technology and want to focus on the real world first.
Most other portable devices on the market do not support this “passive” relationship. Smartwatches (and smart glasses for the most part) are body-worn displays that contribute to the ever-increasing and ubiquitous information overload that technology subjects us to.
Reduce the fear of health technology
Smart rings are screenless devices by nature, and Oura wants to keep it that way. HE Oura 4 Call It contains no flashing lights or indicators (but has internal LEDs to measure heart rate and blood oxygen levels). According to Hale, this decision was aimed at maintaining peace.
“Many of the most attractive and sophisticated applications are the ones that warn you and induce fear when you don’t need it,” he says. “‘Oh, your heart rate is high. You’re dying.’ Who needs this message? I don’t need this message.
I don’t need it either. I’m not the only one who believes that unlimited medical monitoring can quickly turn into a terrifying nightmare that does more harm than good. We know that the obsession with not getting enough sleep causes insomnia. Intensive calorie tracking can cause people to ignore the body’s cues and hunger cues.
This is what Oura is trying to avoid, says Hale. When the company introduced food tracking to its app earlier this year, it was careful to word reviews and focused on “soft” recommendations.
This feature allows you to upload a photo of your food and enter a short description before the AI scans it and gives it a rating: nutritious, good, average or limited. I raise an eyebrow at the “good” rating. You can place a moral value on the food you eat. But Oura decided not to include a “bad” review, which takes away some of the charm of it all.
Oura also tries to prevent people from focusing on assigning a numerical value to food, “which I think leads to some kind of compulsive behavior,” says Hale. You can see your calorie intake if you want, but Oura also offers an option to disable calorie reporting.
“For some people, counting calories is a real trigger,” says Hale. “We try to be very sensitive about it because we don’t want to build an unhealthy relationship with him and we don’t want to embarrass people.”
To help Oura customers get the most out of their ring and subscription, Hale’s No. 1 tip is not to put too much emphasis on one health metric, but rather take a holistic approach to information to guide your actions. (Oura offers data on 40 different activities as part of its $6/£6 monthly fee. The samsung Ring, on the other hand, offers more limited free tracking.)
Hale says the company doesn’t focus on measuring bodies. “It’s about a change in behavior,” he says.
In the case of food, this can work by seeing how your body reacts to what you eat and then seeing how that response relates to other factors, such as whether you were rested, stressed or physically active earlier in the day.
Hale shows me a photo of the Portuguese pie he had eaten in Lisbon the day before. “Surprise,” he said, “watch my blood sugar rise.”
There’s nothing wrong with eating pie: it certainly doesn’t seem to have deterred Hale, who remains cheerful and energetic throughout our conversation. But seeing the effects of a big, sweet meal late at night after a busy day at a tech event can help you better understand your feelings or even inspire you to eat differently the next day to balance things out.
“Everything will be fine”
Oura’s goal is to create context for why your body may behave in a certain way and provide increasingly personalized and generative AI assistance through an LLM-based chatbot to discuss injuries and provide personalized advice. It can also help relieve the stress you feel about your health, says Hale.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is set a supportive tone for the AI, like, ‘You didn’t sleep well, but you’ll be fine,'” he says.
Oura Advisor AI, which the company launched in the summer of 2024, can create the kind of behavioral change Hale wants for Oura customers, such as advising them to take a walk after a big meal to improve digestion. It also takes into account an often overlooked element of long-term health: social connectedness, and will encourage you to spend time with friends and family.
In recent years, longevity culture has exploded as people invest money in products and services such as nutritional supplements and wellness services that promise to extend their lives and health.
The “moral hazard” of these products, according to Hale, is that there is no accountability. “If it works, great,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, don’t call me. You know why? Because you’re dead.”
Oura is not completely excluded from the longevity debate. In May, an ad Hale called “sassy” ran showing seniors living their best lives with Oura rings. But it did not promise that we would all live to be centenarians.
“Our principle is not, buy our supplement because you want to live forever,” says Hale. “Our principle is: change your behavior today to make healthy choices, because then you will live a better life.”
This is a compelling argument that can explain why Oura In total, more than 5.5 million rings were sold. Last September, the company was on track to hit $1 billion in sales for the first time this year. According to the latest statistics from the International Data Corporation, was published in 2024The company had a market share of 80%.
Last month, the company won a “decisive victory” in a patent infringement lawsuit against two of its competitors, Ringconn and Ultrahuman. So when Hale tells me he doesn’t test his competitors’ rings “like he used to” because “they’re copying us,” I know it’s more than bravado.
Thanks to its intellectual property rights and the growing amount of health data that allows it to continue to develop its software, Oura has a clear competitive advantage in this growing market.
“I’m not looking for other things that other people are doing,” Hale says. “I’m looking for really innovative things that we need to do.”