Oura and the future of health

Oura is part of a growing industry worth an estimated $70 billion devoted to helping us sleep better. It includes weighted blankets, health optimization sites like Huffington’s Thrive Global, and sleep tracking tech. Big tech companies have already shown interest in the market. Apple acquired sleep tracker Beddit in 2017 and a year later, Google’s ... See more

Sure, they have the watch, which measures your heart rate. But they’re leaving the majority of the possible device space to others, such as Peloton, WHOOP, and Eight Sleep. Apple doesn't want to go down the path of making health-related hardware devices. These have high fixed R&D and manufacturing costs to make them, and each device tends to only f... See more

Whether or not the Oura ring is an effective Covid-19 alert system is still to be determined, and if research ends up discounting the device, that could become a major challenge for the company.

In the last 10 years there have been mobile apps and smartwatches and bed straps that promise to capture how well we are (or aren’t) sleeping.