Oura’s New App Redesign and Cumulative Stress Feature
▼ Summary
– Oura launched a redesigned app with three personalized tabs: Today for daily insights, Vitals for health trends, and My Health for long-term well-being and habits.
– The app redesign includes enhanced menstrual cycle insights, expanding the view from one month to a 12-month period and fertile window prediction.
– A new Cumulative Stress feature measures chronic stress over the past month using five bodily factors like sleep continuity and heart stress-response, updated weekly.
– Oura is pursuing FDA clearance for blood pressure features and launching a Blood Pressure Profile study to assess hypertension likelihood by combining ring data with user questionnaires.
– The announcement follows Oura’s recent $900 million funding round and the launch of new products, including the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic collection and Health Panels for scheduling blood work.
Oura has unveiled a significant update to its mobile application, introducing a fresh design and a groundbreaking Cumulative Stress feature. The company is also advancing toward FDA clearance for blood pressure monitoring capabilities, aiming to provide users with an assessment of their hypertension likelihood.
The redesigned app focuses on personalization through three primary tabs. A “Today” tab highlights the most pertinent daily insights, while the “Vitals” tab offers quick overviews of sleep patterns, stress levels, and cardiovascular trends. The “My Health” tab delves into long-term wellness, identifying personal strengths, ongoing trends, and areas for proactive health management. This section also includes “Habits” and “Routines” to illustrate how daily behaviors influence overall health.
Additionally, the update brings improved menstrual cycle tracking. Users can now access a twelve-month history of period and fertile window predictions, a substantial expansion from the previous one-month view.
The new Cumulative Stress feature helps individuals understand how their bodies manage and accumulate stress over extended periods. This measurement draws from the past month’s data and refreshes weekly. Five key physiological factors determine a user’s cumulative stress score: sleep continuity, cardiac stress response, sleep micro-motions, temperature regulation, and activity impact.
Jason Russell, Oura’s Vice President of Consumer Software Product, explained that this goes beyond simply counting stressful hours. Instead, it measures various bodily functions that indicate prolonged stress. He noted that how heart rate and heart rate variability recover after stress, overnight temperature regulation, sleep continuity, and subtle sleep movements all provide signatures of high cumulative stress affecting the body.
This innovative feature will become available to users worldwide in the coming weeks.
Concurrently, Oura is developing an FDA-approved blood pressure feature through a new Blood Pressure Profile study. This research will explore how the technology can passively detect early hypertension indicators by monitoring key physiological signals in the background.
The company has received Institutional Review Board approval for this study, which will launch later this year through Oura Labs in the United States. Participants will receive hypertension likelihood notifications by combining Oura Ring data with brief questionnaires about family history, medications, and lifestyle habits. The assessment will categorize users as having no signs, moderate signs, or major signs of hypertension.
Those showing strong indicators will receive recommendations to consult healthcare professionals. The algorithm will also monitor changes over time, prompting regular reassessments throughout the study period.
This announcement follows closely on Oura’s recent $900 million funding round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, with additional investment from ICONIQ, Whale Rock, and Atreides. The company has also recently introduced its Oura Ring 4 Ceramic collection, its first charging case, and Health Panels enabling members to schedule blood work directly through the app.
(Source: TechCrunch)
