Oura Ring: new stress management functions

I often have a watch on each wrist and I often wear one of them at night in order to get more accurate statistics about my sleep. However, watches are not always the best thing to wear at night. They can cause some discomfort or curl up in the sheets. For an optimal sleep tracking experience, I prefer to wear an Oura ring on my finger.

I have been entering data with an Oura ring for a few years and the company has continued to launch new features and new designs, such as the Oura Horizon ring. Oura’s latest announcement is about stress management functions that include daytime stress, reflections and stress resilience (coming during the winter season). In addition to the stress management functions, a brushed titanium version is also being launched at a price of 449 euros, which is 100 euros more than the current Horizon models.

Stress management is one of the main reasons why I like to use wearables. Because stress can be an important factor for health and well-being in general. We may feel like we are not stressed, but having an independent source capture the data to confirm your condition helps to better understand the stressors and helps you find ways to manage stress.

Picture: Oura

Focus on stress and mental health

Most wearables today focus on stress and mental health, with functions that offer reflections or breathing exercises to help you take a break from your life and understand your mental and physical state. The new stress management functions that are being deployed for Oura Ring users are as follows:

• Daytime stress : Daytime Stress identifies stress triggers by continuously measuring small changes in biometric data such as heart rate and temperature. By recording readings every 15 minutes, members can see which experiences add stress to their day and which ones help them recover.
• Reflections : Now available in beta for iOS, Reflections is a new AI-powered feature in the Oura app. Keeping a diary is an effective tool to reduce stress, and Reflections aims to make this practice even easier. By allowing members to speak and record a short diary entry and use a single gesture to record mood and mental state, the Oura app eliminates the effort of keeping a diary, tracking mood and tagging. Speech recognition transcribes the text, while AI-powered automatic labeling automatically creates a context for the data.
• 
  
  Resilience to stress (launching this winter): Based on Oura’s fundamental health and well-being measures, Stress Resilience makes it possible to evaluate the ability of the limbs to resist physiological stress by tracking the stress load during the day, recovery during the day and recovery during sleep. Associated with daytime stress, Stress Resilience allows Oura members to find a balance between stress and recovery by providing them with information, education and recommendations to manage stress and improve overall health.

I tried an Oura Ring 3 in Stealth color and then a Silver Horizon model. The new Brushed Titanium colorway is fantastic and would go perfectly with my Apple Watch Ultra 2 and my Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max in natural titanium. The brushed titanium model is also equipped with a PVD coating which increases its durability. I have seen user comments asking for durability improvements on a daily basis, but I have noticed good performance even with the two models that I have tested previously.

Source: “ZDNet.com “