Your Oura Ring will soon be receiving three new features to help you manage stress, understand what causes it, and even offer recommendations on how to relax.
The full update will be released incrementally starting off today with Daytime Stress. This tool identifies what triggers your stress by constantly checking for “small changes” like heart rate fluctuations and shifts in body temperature. The device records these changes every 15 minutes or so. You can check these readings on your smartphone via the Oura app, where it’ll tell you “which experiences add stress… and which ones help [you] recover.” The on-screen dot graph informs users when they are the most exhausted as well as when they are totally relaxed. A daily summary appears the moment you launch the app.
There is a catch: users will need to have a subscription to the Oura Membership in order to access Daytime Stress. It’s unknown if there are plans to roll out the feature to non-subscribers.
Letting it all out
Next is Reflections, an AI-powered journal for the Oura smartphone app. It allows users to record short entries in the app about what’s stressing them out. The company claims “journaling is an effective tool for reducing stress” with Reflections making this process a lot easier. To get the conservation started, there will be a prompt question at the top of the screen.
Speech recognition will automatically transcribe the text while the AI will suggest implementing tags to “correspond with your journal entries”. Those tags will add context “to help you understand your own personal stressors”. That way, you’ll know, or at least have some idea, of how to recover. Also, if you don’t feel like talking, you can always type in an entry.
This feature is currently in beta for iOS devices. No word on whether or not the beta will migrate over to Android, although we did ask.
Road to (stress) recovery
Rounding out the trio is Stress Resilience coming out this winter. True to its name, this function “creates an assessment” detailing how resilient someone is to certain “physiological” situations. It tracks a person’s “daytime stress load”, how they recover during the day, and how they recover while sleeping. Paired with Daytime Stress mentioned earlier, the tool will provide “insights, education, and recommendations” on how to manage everything. The goal here is to aid people in finding the most effective way to chill out.
We reached out to Oura for clarification for certain things like if there will be an Android version of Reflections plus the exact launch date of Stress Resilience. This story will be updated at a later time.
Until then, check out TechRadar’s list of the best smart rings for 2023.