Tested by Thinking about buying an Oura Ring to track your health and wellness? You’re not alone. Oura – which is now on its fourth iteration – has a cult following, with A-list celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow and Prince Harry all reported to be fans. Though a number of brands, including tech giant Samsung, have launched their own discreet wearables over the past few years, Oura still dominates the market.
I’m a huge fan myself (I wore the Oura Ring 3 daily for over a year), so I couldn’t wait to try the new and improved version, which promises more accurate tracking, a comfier fit and improved battery life.
To find out whether it lives up to its claims, our Good Housekeeping Institute experts put it through its paces, assessing a range of factors, including set-up, ease of use, design and overall performance. I also trialled the ring over a four-month period, wearing it 24/7 for work, sleep and exercise.
If it’s a quick answer you’re after, then it’s a resounding “yes” from us – the Oura Ring 4 scored a best-in-class 94/100 in our tests. Read on for everything you need to know.
Pros
- Lightweight and comfortable
- Stylish and subtle
- Excellent battery life
- Waterproof
- Intuitive to set up and use
- In-depth sleep and health tracking
- Stress management tools
- Menstrual cycle insights
Cons
- Expensive
- £5.99 monthly subscription on top of the device
- Wearing a ring isn’t for everyone
- Fitness tracking could be improved
- Picks up scratches
What is an Oura Ring?
Although the Oura Ring looks like a stylish piece of jewellery, it's actually a smart tracker that gathers a vast array of data and provides actionable insights to help you reach your personal health goals – whether you’re looking to improve the quality of your sleep, manage your stress levels or learn more about your menstrual cycle.
As Oura gathers more data about you and establishes your baseline habits, temperature and heart rate, it can highlight any deviations from the norm and identify areas in your sleep and overall health that could improve.
As it’s a ring, it doesn’t have a screen. Instead, you can access all your stats via the accompanying Oura app on your phone.
If you’re a dedicated Samsung user and want a seamless smart ring experience, check out our in-depth Samsung Galaxy Ring review.
Oura Ring 4 vs Oura Ring 3: what’s new?
The Oura Ring 4 boasts new ‘smart sensing’ tech, which works with the three built-in medical grade sensors to make them even more accurate.
This includes a PPG (infrared photoplethysmography) sensor, which uses LED lights to measure your heart rate and respiratory rate, and a body temperature sensor that can alert you when you’re coming down with an illness, identify hormonal changes affecting your sleep and help track your menstrual cycle. There’s also a 3D accelerometer for logging daily movement.
The smart sensing tech allows Oura to better adapt to your finger to find the optimal signal pathway for more accurate data with less gaps. The Gen 4 ring has 18 signal pathways, while the Gen 3 has just eight.
As some of the sensors are turned off when not in use, it offers a lengthier battery life of up to eight days, as opposed to seven days with its predecessor.
Then, the three sensors have been recessed, so instead of three domes poking into your skin, there are two unnoticeable bumps and a series of sensors, making it comfier to wear and easier to get on and off over your knuckles.
Finally, it comes in an extended range of 12 sizes to accommodate more people and has a revamped charging port.
How we test the Oura Ring
Our Good Housekeeping Institute experts judge the smart ring on the following criteria.
Set up and ease of use: We assess how easy the ring is to set up and personalise, and look at how intuitive the app is to use. We also note its battery life.
Design and comfort: Our tester examines the overall design of the product, considering how comfortable it is, whether it interferes with daily activity and how aesthetically pleasing it is.
Performance: Scores are awarded based on the ring’s sleep, health, activity and menstrual cycle-tracking capabilities, as well as how easy the information is to interpret. We also analyse the data to check for accuracy in terms of sleep, activity and heart rate.
The Good Housekeeping Institute’s Oura Ring review
Scoring an impressive 94/100 overall, here’s how the Oura Ring performed during testing.
Design
One of the Oura Ring’s main USPs is its discreet design. Although it's larger and chunkier than a standard ring (more like a band), it’s lightweight (between 3.3-5.2g) and feels comfortable to wear day and night.
For maximum comfort and accurate tracking, it’s important to get the right size. It should be snug and secure around your finger, without feeling uncomfortably tight. Before purchasing, the brand sends you a free sizing kit with 12 plastic rings. It recommends you try out your pick of sizing ring for at least 24 hours to help you find the perfect fit.
Once you’ve chosen your size, it’s time to select a finish, with five to choose from including black, silver, brushed silver, gold and rose gold.
Whichever colour you go for, the ring is made from 100% lightweight titanium, which is ultra durable. We love that it’s totally waterproof (up to 100m underwater), so you can keep it on while you’re in the bath, shower or swimming pool. It can also handle extreme heat and cold, so you can happily wear it in a hot tub, sauna, steam room or even in an ice bath.
The only downside is that it’s susceptible to small scratches from consistent use. They’re not super noticeable, but we recommend taking it off when cleaning or lifting weights to keep it in pristine condition. Alternatively, you can purchase a simple silicone ring protector.
Battery life
One of the major benefits of no screen is the lengthy battery life. The brand says the smart ring can last up to eight days on one single charge – which is significantly longer than an Apple Watch, which has to be charged almost daily. During testing, the charge lived up to its claims, although factors like extreme temperatures, blood oxygen sensing and frequent activity tracking can drain the battery faster.
The ring takes between 20 and 80 minutes to recharge, so you can easily pop it on its sleek charging dock before bed if you notice it’s running out of juice. Handily, the app will also alert you when it’s running low.
Note that it’s easy to knock your ring off the charger's open base. Plus, you can only charge it with the Oura-specific dock, which isn’t ideal if you go away and forget to take it with you.
Set up and ease of use
The Oura Ring is a breeze to set up – you simply download the accompanying app, pair the device with Bluetooth, fill in your metrics and you’re good to go.
There are handy step-by-step instructions to guide you, and the entire process takes around 10 minutes. It’s pretty foolproof.
The Oura app
The app has had a redesign, making it easier to interpret both your daily and long-term health stats, with three main tabs: Today, Vitals and My Health.
The Today tab provides relevant, timely health updates from morning to night to help you navigate your day. You can see your sleep, activity and readiness scores, as well as your heart rate, stress levels and a timeline of activities.
The Vitals tab is where all your key metrics are located for a quick, holistic overview of your health. Here, you can see if your scores are within your normal range and review the metrics that have contributed to each score.
Finally, there’s the My Health tab, which focuses on long-term trends, so you can see how your daily habits are impacting your overall health. It covers stress resilience and cardiovascular age, along with weekly, quarterly and yearly reports, which you can share with a healthcare provider.
The revamped app also offers a more personalised approach, with AI features including an Oura Advisor chatbot and a meal logging system, which can recognise what food you’ve eaten from a picture and includes it on your timeline. It’s not about tracking calories, but helps you see how your eating and drinking habits might be impacting your health and sleep.
Overall, it was extremely intuitive and a pleasure to use. Although there’s an enormous amount of data on there, it's easy to interpret thanks to the colour-coded graphs, charts, scores and summary reports.
Sleep tracking
Oura’s advanced sleep tracking capabilities is what really sets it apart from its competitors. Each morning, you’re presented with a sleep score, which is based on seven different elements. These include total sleep time, sleep efficiency (how much time you spent in bed asleep) and restlessness (how often you were tossing and turning). Time spent in REM and deep sleep (crucial for physical and emotional recovery) and sleep latency (how long it takes you to fall asleep) are also considered.
Additionally, after 90 days of use, Oura will assign you a chronotype, essentially letting you know if you’re an early bird or a night owl. It will also tell you how well your current sleep patterns align with your optimal sleep window.
We were highly impressed with the sleep insights, which were far more detailed than other trackers we’ve tried. It’s particularly interesting to see how various lifestyle factors affect your sleep – unsurprisingly, alcohol, stress and large meals late at night seem to have a major impact on my ability to get a decent night’s rest. This has encouraged me to follow a proper wind-down routine before bed, which includes using the app’s meditations to soothe my mind. After a session, you can see how it’s affected your heart rate, HRV and skim temperature – it's truly fascinating!
Readiness score
We were also big fans of the readiness score, which combines several metrics including your sleep score, activity score, resting heart rate, HRV, body temperature and more, to let you know how well rested and recovered you are and how much you can take on during the day.
Like the sleep score, I found my own impression of my readiness matched the score it gave me. When my energy levels were high, my readiness score was also high, and when I didn’t feel so great, the app suggested I give myself a break and stick to gentle activity.
Personally, I love Oura’s more holistic approach to health and fitness. While many fitness trackers push you to hit arbitrary step, calorie and exercise targets, regardless of how you’re feeling, Oura encourages you to listen to your body. I'm often guilty of pushing myself too hard and squeezing in as many workouts as I can during the week, so I've found the readiness score has helped me prioritise rest and recovery.
Activity tracking
Your activity score is based on how much you moved the previous day and is designed to help you balance activity, inactivity and rest. A high score indicates you’ve met your movement goals, while a lower score indicates the balance is off and you may need to make some lifestyle tweaks.
The Oura Ring tracks all your basics including steps, and calories burned (you can input your goals), and autodetects over 40 activities, from running to gardening. Previously, there was only heart rate tracking for five activities, but now there’s automatic heart rate detection for all 40, plus heart rate zone tracking. It can also import data from apps including Apple Health, Strava and Google Fit to provide a more accurate score.
Though the activity score was helpful, I found that the activity detection feature was a bit hit and miss. It didn’t recognise all my workouts correctly. For instance, it once logged my Pilates workout as a 45-minute walk and on another occasion, it suggested I had done a workout when I was just pottering around the house.
Due to the lack screen, it’s hard to compare to the best activity trackers, which have built-in GPS and can provide live running splits or heart rate data on the move. If advanced fitness tracking is your priority, then you’re better off with a dedicated fitness watch or using one alongside the Oura Ring.
Stress monitoring
Oura’s stress tracking has also improved, with an insightful daytime stress feature, measuring your heart rate, HRV, motion and temperature changes throughout the day to shed some light on your physiological stress levels.
On the Today tab, you’ll find a graph that’s updated in real time with four zones: stressed, engaged, relaxed and restored. You can tag the add ‘tags’ to help you identify what’s causing your stress as well as the activity that help you decompress.
Oura also tracks your resilience – based on your daytime stress load, daily restorative time and sleep recovery – to highlight your ability to bounce back from stress over time.
Women’s health tracking
Based on fluctuations in your body temperature, along with your HRV, respiratory rate and sleep, the ring offers insights into your cycle length, phases and period prediction. For those who use non-hormonal birth control or are interested in tracking their ovulation, it also shows estimated fertile window, the chance of conception and the detected day of ovulation.
While most trackers assume your cycle is the same each month, Oura’s period predictions adapt as your cycle changes after wearing it for 60 days.
Final verdict: Is the Oura Ring worth it?
If you’re in the market for a smart ring, Oura is undoubtedly still the best in the game. There’s no getting away from the hefty price tag (and the ongoing subscription cost), but if you want to improve your sleep, understand your body better and you can afford it, I'd say it’s most definitely worth it.
It’s also a great choice if you don’t enjoy wearing chunky fitness watches or want a screen constantly bombarding you with notifications. Accurate, easy to use and unobtrusive, it really does live up to the hype.
As a health and wellness writer, I’ve tried a lot of wearables over the years, but the Oura Ring is my all-time favourite. At the time of writing, I’ve been wearing it for well over a year and don’t plan on taking it off anytime soon. It has become an integral part of my health and wellbeing routine.
The Oura Ring is available to buy directly from the Oura website, Amazon and Healf.
Priyankaa is our sleep and wellness expert, specialising in expert-tested reviews and roundups on the latest health and fitness products. From walking boots to running machines, Priyankaa has written about hundreds of products and is passionate about providing in-depth, unbiased reviews. Plus, as an avid runner and gymgoer, she knows exactly what to look for when finding the right gymwear, fitness tracker or earphones.
Priyankaa has an MA in Magazine Journalism from Cardiff University and over five years’ experience in health and fitness journalism. Priyankaa has written for Stylist’s Strong Women Training Club, where she regularly wrote about diversity in the fitness industry, nutrition tips, training advice and her experience completing various fitness challenges. She has also written for a variety of publications including Business Insider, Glamour, Bustle, Metro, HuffPost UK, gal-dem and more. Outside of work, Priyankaa can usually be found trying out a new gym class, seeking out London's best eats or watching a Spanish TV show in a bid to keep up her language skills.
Kim Hawley is our health and fitness product tester. Her career in fitness has spanned over 30 years. Prior to joining the Good Housekeeping Institute, she worked as a personal trainer, writer and fitness instructor for some of London’s most prestigious health clubs, including The Harbour Club, David Lloyd and The Chelsea Club. Passionate about women’s health and fitness, especially in pre/post menopause, she is also a Level 4 PT and holds a professional nutritional qualification. Kim is responsible for rigorously testing everything from cross trainers to smart watches.
