- RATING
The Oura Ring 4 delivers both style and function and does a great job providing a detailed overview of your health and wellbeing without being weighed down with a smartwatch.
The Oura Ring was one of the first smart rings released and it continues to lead the way in providing insights into our health and wellbeing.
Tech Guide has been using the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic for more than a month and it delivered some remarkable insights to help improve our sleep, reduce our stress and track our activity.
One area we wanted to focus was on our sleep and wearing a ring like the Oura is a much easier and more discreet way to track our slumber.
We don’t like to sleep with a smartwatch on so the Oura smart ring was one of the best options.
Before we got started, we received the sizing kit to find the right size ring for our finger. Size 13 was the size for us.
The Oura Ring 4 Ceramic is available in a few colours – we settled on Midnight which is a blue grey colour with a glossy finish.
It has stylish look and feel so it doesn’t stand out from your other jewellery – that’s a good thing. It looks like a regular ring.
It can be worn on any finger with a small mark indicating the part of the ring that needs to be at palm level to ideally position the onboard sensors on the inside of the ring.
Oura works with iOS and Android devices and has an excellent companion app that you can track your sleep, activities, stress and heart rate.
It also can also provide insights for women including menstrual cycle tracking and cycle insights.
Set-up is really simple and part of the onboarding process is selecting a plan which is $10 per month or $110 if you pay annually.
The Oura ring requires the membership for users to receive the insights which are determined after analysing your data.
The Oura app is well-designed and easy to navigate.
It presents a nice timeline of your day and can automatically track when you woke up, your activities and even it can even tell if you had a short nap.
These are all subject to you conforming these activities to improve its accuracy which we did. It didn’t miss a beat.
On the sleep side, which was our main area of interest, it showed our total sleep, our sleep efficiency, restfulness, REM sleep, deep sleep, latency and timing.
Efficiency means the amount of time we spent asleep compared to the time spent awake while in bed while rest fullness tracks the number of times we woke up and moved throughout the night.
It was remarkable the depth and the accuracy of the data.
But the beauty of the Oura – and this is the same across heart and stress and activities – it suggestions on the areas you need to improve and then tells you how you can do it.
For me, it was no surprise to hear that I need more sleep.
Every morning it takes all the info and gives you an overall score so at a glance you can see your progress.
For me Oura suggested a more appropriate time to go to bed as well as an ideal sleep length I should be aiming for.
The same discovery and analysis can be applied for your activities and calorie burning and it can also be seen on a daily dashboard and charted on weekly graph for a better overview.
We had a good activity score because we generally walk between 5km and 7km a day so it was a case of keep up the good work.
The ring was able to show us our hourly movement, daily goals, training frequency, training volume and recovery time.
Oura can track up to 40 different activities so if you run, swim, walk, play tennis and play golf and much more – it’s got you covered.
It will count the calories burned and the steps taken and allow you to set goals for the number of calories you want to burn or the steps you want to take.
And in terms of accuracy – it was pretty close to the activity tracking we were getting from the Apple Watch Ultra 3.
The Oura Ring 4 also tracks your heart rate 24/7 so you can see what it was while you were sleeping, while you were active and while you’re at rest.
It will take all this information and fluctuations and then create a stress score so users can see if they need to take a break or relax.
There is also a section called Readiness which takes all your data into account and comes up with a score that reflects your current state.
Add it all up and it provides more than enough information and suggestions to improve your health and general wellbeing.
The Oura Ring 4 battery lasts for about a week so it’s no hassle of having of charge it up too often.
It comes with a charging stand that the Oura ring slips over with a full charge achieved in around an hour.
The Oura Ring 4 Ceramic is not cheap – it’s $799 which is about the same price as a decent smartwatch which has a screen and a free companion app.
But a smartwatch is less discreet and, in our view, not ideal for tracking sleep.
If you already own a smartwatch then you could probably do without a smart ring.
But if you don’t own a smartwatch and nit intention of getting one but you still want to keep track of yourself then the Oura Ring 4 could fit the bill for you.
VERDICT
The Oura Ring 4 delivers both style and function and does a great job providing a detailed overview of your health and wellbeing without being weighed down with a smartwatch.
