Oura Ring 4

What does scientifically validating mean here? In my opinion, that just makes this article sound like marketing.

Two reasons. First- the best way to understand it, for technical folks who, say, operate software services- your main source of telemetry about yourself- more specifically, your cognitive operating capacity- is what's called interoception. This includes some more or less binary measures that your brain LLM has developed/evolved over time, as well as a bunch of qualitative factors that are themselves often an unreliable indicator of the "load" your "system" may be facing (from infection, injury, overeating, alcohol, stress, whatever). How do you "feel"? Eh, that's not reliable.

The Oura is a good enough quantitative sensor that conveys a number of metrics that are extremely useful in understanding factors impacting the "performance" of your "system." Overnight heart rate, temperature, HRV, actual sleep stages and sequences and times- it isn't obvious to someone if they haven't received this data, but once you start receiving it, it is tremendously useful, both because it is explanatory and because it is actionable. Life is a continual maintenance process and in the absence of that telemetry, you're going to be less responsive to certain categories of challenges your person is exposed to. The Oura has often picked up on or provided a heads up that my person was under load in ways I was not consciously aware of, and that has been helpful in allowing me to plan to, like, take a nap, to improve recovery, or pick up my exercise routine. When you don't have this data, you just don't know what you're missing.

The second reason is that the Oura business continues to work to deepen the metrics and the distillations in ways that initially don't seem (to me) to be immediately valuable- a newish metric called "resilience" is an example of this- but then as I follow the telemetry over time my mental model evolves to understand and identify what actual aspect of my interoceptive experience that metric attempts to quantify. This work is insightful, almost art, and takes judgement, and I have been impressed by the Oura team's decisions here. So I am happy to continue to give them my money- it is far more useful of a subscription than, like, $15/mo for Spotify.

I will probably get the 4- I assume that it will be a more sensitive instrument. Right now the 3 has some instrumentation flaws and limitations. It sometimes misses naps or certain activities. It only samples temp and heartrate once a minute. There is a fair amount of modeling on top of the underlying dataset. I imagine the 4 will represent an advance in sensitivity, and therefore hopefully an improvement in the models reporting metrics.

Hope that's helpful. Really is super useful as continual telemetry.

* Track my sleep (ongoing, not just initially) - My sleep wasn't as good as I thought it was, so it's good to try and improve my sleep hygiene. I like seeing how much deep and REM sleep I got the night before and my blood oxygen levels. The app will advise to take it easy if it thinks your readiness isn't good, which is a good excuse to chill out :)

* Daily slovenliness tracker - it'll remind me to get up and have a move around if I've been sat still too long.

I've started resistance training recently and it's good to see the progress before any significant outward physical differences appear:

* Track my workouts

* Track activity - its figures are a little on the high side for calories burned, but if you treat it as a relative guide, then it's useful.

* Track recovery

* Track heart-rate and resting heart-rate

* Track heart-rate variability

* Measure VO2 Max

* Track stress - I always thought my intense periods of work were potentially stressful, turns out they're not and I rarely get stressed!

I pay no attention to the 'steps' figure, instead the app sets a daily goal - based on your readiness - with calories burned (or sometimes it'll tell you to have some downtime if your body temperature is high, or your sleep was poor, or your recovery wasn't good).

The long-term trends it tracks are just good to see, as one of the other commentators said: it's telemetry for you. The app is actually good. Which I don't say about many apps. It's certainly much, much better than the Apple Health app.

I don't consider the data to be super accurate (I haven't put it against any professional monitoring tech), it's all about relative changes to your vitals over time imho. I had no idea where my physiology was before, now I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. As someone approaching 50 it's nice to confirm that I'm not dying yet ;)

I have pre-ordered an Oura Ring 4, even though the improvements seem relatively minimal, mostly because they're just useful enough and I buy into what they're doing and think they deserve to succeed.

I've had mine for over two years now, and I've been pretty happy with it. I got it as an alternative to an Apple Watch for health & fitness monitoring, and it has turned out better than I expected. I think it's better than the watch in some ways, such as the battery life being long enough, and the ring being comfortable enough that I can easily use it while sleeping.