Once again, we’re releasing an integration I’m enthusiastic about right around my birthday, and this time it wasn’t even planned that way! So what is Oura? They make wearable health trackers in the form of rings, which are super wearable and maybe even a little bit stylish. (Uh, don’t take any style tips from me, though.) Bethany and I both use Oura, and I’ve been very quickly won over by mine, despite only getting it back in July.
Why choose Oura
All the data, and how it handles that data! It tracks many of the same metrics as (for example) my Garmin did, but now that it’s collected enough data about me, it compares me not against other people but against my own baseline. So while it notices that my heart rate variability (HRV) is very low compared to other people, and it definitely flags that up, it doesn’t yell at me about it quite as much as it felt like Garmin did. It accepts that by my own standards I’m pretty relaxed (rather than tracking me as stressed for literally every waking moment).
It has some nice nuance in the charts, where it doesn’t just register stress and relaxation, but gradations between the two. My state gets categorized into stressed, engaged, relaxed, and restorative. And it graphs this over the course of the day.
The device tracks sleep very well, graphing your heart rate overnight and providing some examples to compare it to. Apparently my heart rate nearly always speeds up right after I fall asleep, which is probably a sign of physical overtiredness. With that data, I’ve made some tweaks and things look a little better!
For the female-bodied among us, it also makes a great period tracker. It requires 60 days of data to make predictions, but even before the 60 days are up, you can give it information about your last cycle and typical cycle length, and it’ll start fitting that together with your body temperature each night.
And speaking of body temperature, I was pretty impressed when it picked up the fact that I had a high temperature overnight before I realised I felt terrible. I’d figured it was just picking up some random fluctuation, but that day I was genuinely pretty run down.
I’ve really only dipped into the basics here. Oura is packed with features to help you figure out your readiness to exercise, your stress levels, sleep quality, resting heart rate, etc. If you want a casual day-to-day health tracker, it’s pretty great — though it’s worth noting that Garmin and Fitbit are still ahead of it on activity tracking accuracy. If you’re a marathon runner tracking your training, you probably still want to opt for a more traditional wearable.
And how can I use Oura with Beeminder?
To start with, we’ve picked three metrics that Bethany and I are particularly interested in and find useful:
- Sedentary time
- Sleep
- Steps
This way, not only do we get the great data and analysis from the Oura app, we can get a little nudge to improve our scores, get moving, and get some solid sleep! If there’s something else you can track via Oura that you’re interested in beeminding, we’d be eager to hear about that and how you’d like to see it graphed.
To create a goal with one of those metrics, head to beeminder.com/new, pick the Oura icon from the list of integrations, and choose the metric you’d like to graph. Or, here, have a button:
Choosing sedentary time creates a Do Less goal, limiting you to a maximum of X hours of sedentary time per day. The sleep and steps metrics create Do More goals. For a walkthrough on goal setup, check out the help doc we’ve already lined up!