Oura Ring 5 review: Size is everything
Like its predecessors, the Oura Ring 5 monitors your activity, heart rate and temperature, crunching the numbers to offer insights on your health. Its app
Like its predecessors, the Oura Ring 5 monitors your activity, heart rate and temperature, crunching the numbers to offer insights on your health. Its app boils down your metrics to a series of scores (out of 100), keeping you appraised on how well you're doing. Open it up and you'll get a glanceable picture of how rested you are, how much you've moved and how relaxed you are. Below that, about half of your screen's real estate will be taken up with a single item you need to focus on — if the system thinks you're too tired or stressed, for example, it'll show you. These metrics aren't tied to your vital statistics in the way you may think or expect, which can sometimes give odd results. For instance, the recent UK heatwaves meant I had a night sleeplessly laying in bed, but the next day I got a sleep score of 84.
But the ring knew I was struggling, and gave me a Readiness score of 56 thanks to my elevated resting heart rate and lowered heart rate variability. This is because the Sleep score doesn't measure how well you sleep, but how well structured your sleep is — go to bed and wake up on time, and you'll get praise. Unfortunately, Oura's interesting new features aren't yet available to test here in the UK, including Health Radar. It's an evolution of the company's Symptom Radar, which keeps an eye on trends to act as an early warning system for any impending issues. Health Radar keeps watch on the longer term picture, including monitoring your blood pressure and breathing at night. The ring can't actually measure your blood pressure, it's algorithmically derived from the signals it already collects. For instance, it'll use the optical heart rate sensor while you're sleeping to examine your pulse wave velocity, and make an inference from there.
Similarly to Health Radar, Health Records and GLP-1 insights are presently limited to the US and some other territories. The existing suite of features are plenty good enough to help you stay healthy. For instance, the app is proactive about advising you to rest or keep your stress down, and it gives you alerts when it thinks you've been sedentary too long. As with all wearables, so long as you don't entirely outsource your relationship with your body to its conclusions, you'll benefit from having something keeping an eye on how you're doing. I'm not qualified to speak about the health features for people who menstruate but there's plenty of those here. Oura has a longstanding tie-up with Natural Cycles, the app that provides non-hormonal birth control utilizing the ring's temperature monitoring. Natural Cycles recently began offering sleep insights that pull data from Oura, giving users an even deeper picture of their health.
The BriefWire