According to recent updates, your favourite smart ring Oura will soon get three new features to help you manage stress, understand what’s causing it, and even make recommendations on how to relax.
The full update will be released gradually starting today with Daytime Stress. This tool identifies what’s causing your stress by continually checking for ‘small changes’, such as heart rate fluctuations and shifts in body temperature. The device records these changes approximately every 15 minutes. You can view these readings on your smartphone through the Oura app, where it will tell you “which experiences add stress… and which ones help (you) recover.” The on-screen dot graph informs users when they are most exhausted and when they are completely relaxed. A daily overview appears the moment you start the app.
There’s a catch: users must subscribe to Oura membership to access Daytime Stress. It is unknown if there are plans to roll out the feature to non-subscribers.
Let everything out
Next up is Reflections, an AI-powered journal for the Oura smartphone app. This allows users to record short entries in the app about what is stressing them out. The company claims that “journaling is an effective tool for reducing stress,” with Reflections making this process a lot easier. To get the preservation started, a prompt will appear at the top of the screen.
Speech recognition will automatically transcribe the text, while the AI will suggest implementing tags to “correspond to your journal entries”. These tags add context “to help you understand your own personal stressors.” That way you know, or at least have an idea, of how to recover. If you don’t feel like talking, you can always type something.
This feature is currently in beta for iOS devices. No word on whether or not the beta will migrate to Android, although we did ask.
Road to (stress) recovery
The trio is rounded out with Stress Resilience, which will be released this winter. True to its name, this feature creates “an assessment” that details how resilient someone is in certain “physiological” situations. It tracks a person’s “daytime stress load,” how they recover during the day, and how they recover while they sleep. Combined with the aforementioned daytime stress, the tool will provide “insights, education and recommendations” on how to manage it all. The goal here is to help people find the most effective way to relax.
We’ve reached out to Oura for clarification on certain issues, including whether there will be an Android version of Reflections and the exact launch date of Stress Resilience. This story will be updated at a later date.
Until then, check out TechRadar’s list of the best smart rings for 2023.