Oura Ring Latest Updates Will Tell You More About Contraception and Menopause
Users of the Oura ring will soon be able to get more information about their hormonal health. It’s a smart ring, it’s well known for it sleep tracking and other health metrics, will add hormonal birth control and updated menopause information starting May 6, Oura said Friday.
The Oura Ring already provides cycle and pregnancy information as well as fertile window predictions. The new update expands on these features by allowing members to list more than 20 contraceptive combinations they use, such as pills, patches, IUDs and other hormonal methods.
The information is designed to help users understand how their contraceptive methods may affect things like sleep, recovery and body temperature. Menstruating members will be able to use this data to determine what a normal cycle looks like based on hormone and hormone-free days.
“When more than half of women in their reproductive years use contraceptives and more than a billion women go through menopause and perimenopause, asking them to rely on trial and error, vague validation, or standard symptom trackers is not enough,” said Holly Shelton, Oura’s chief product officer, in a statement.
As with any device that collects and analyzes personal data, there are questions about how private that information is and what companies can do with it — or what happens in the event of a data breach. When the Oura launched an AI chatbot in April focused on women’s health, the company said it does not sell customer health data and plans to design a “private AI” function, which only allows AI data to be processed and processed on your device.
Data about menstrual health it is very sensitive. After the 2022 US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which rejected the federal immunity of Roe v. After abortion rights, many users of period tracking apps became concerned that such data could be used to sue people seeking abortion care.
Oura already has a cycle-insights feature for those who are you experience perimenopause and menopause symptomswith a 12-question test that measures symptoms and gives you “impact on quality of life”. Once completed, a PDF containing all your symptoms is generated and can be shared with the doctor.
The new menopause data are similar and provide a self-report questionnaire known as the menopause outcome scale. As some members enter this stage of life, a questionnaire (developed by Oura’s clinical and scientific teams) assesses the burden of symptoms and the impact on quality of life. These include questions about mood, cognition, sleep and daily functioning, showing members how perimenopause affects them on a daily basis.
“By linking hormonal context to Oura’s biometric data, we’re giving women visibility, language, and evidence they’ve never had on this scale,” Shelton said.
Along with these updates, Oura said it is partnering with virtual health platform Twentyeight Health to connect US members with licensed doctors for same-day appointments. Oura already has partnerships with various virtual healthcare platforms, including Maven Clinic, Midi Health, Evernow, Vida Health and Progyny. And in April, Oura launched a a conversational AI specific to women’s healthintended to help women answer health questions.
