Oura is launching a new social feature called “Circles” that lets users share their personal health journeys with their friends and family, the smart ring company announced on Thursday. The new opt-in experience allows Oura users to share their daily scores with their community, send reactions and check in with each other.
The Oura Ring monitors biometric data, including heart rate, heart rate variability, temperature, blood oxygen and more. Each day, these health metrics are summarized into three scores: Readiness, Sleep and Activity. With Circles, users now have the option to share their scores with their support circles. Oura says this enables users to have meaningful conversations about their well-being, while also being able to provide support to those in their circles.
Image Credits: Oura
At launch, users will be able to be part of up to 10 circles and will have the option to choose which daily scores they would like to share. Each circle can have 10 members. There’s also the option to customize whether you share your scores daily or weekly. Users will have the ability to react in-app to other user’s data with a pre-set group of custom emojis. For instance, you can applaud a friend for a great Sleep Score with a crown emoji. These emojis will be shown for 24 hours.
“Isolation fundamentally affects our mental, physical, and societal health, which is why the US surgeon general recently reported that chronic loneliness is a public health crisis, increasing the risk of cognitive decline by 50%, cardiovascular disease by 29%, and stroke incidence by 32%,” said Oura CEO Tom Hale in a statement. “Our mission at ŌURA has always been to improve the lives of our members by taking a compassionate approach to health, and this new feature is just the next step in delivering a personalized experience that allows our members to connect with not only their bodies, but also their friends and family.”
The new social feature is launching alongside Oura’s new New Sleep Staging Algorithm, which is now rolling out of beta for both iOS and Android users. The company says the new algorithm is “among the most accurate sleep staging algorithms available in a consumer wearable.” The algorithm achieved 79% agreement with polysomnography (PSG) for four-stage sleep classification (wake, light, deep and rapid eye movement [REM] sleep), and was developed using one of the largest sleep datasets to date.