How a Sleep Tracker Became the Hottest Device of the Pandemic

The challenge for products like Oura to last beyond the novelty stage is simply to be irreplaceably useful: To translate data into meaningful advice and to provide it with the right balance of authority and empathy. If Oura can keep improving its software to make personal insights more clear and prescriptive — beyond “hey, you really should go to b... See more

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

Much of the tech industry’s sleep innovation is aimed at helping people get regular sleep, but it has a lot of metrics attached to it as well.

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.

Fitness tracking is one of the Apple Watch’s most popular features, and this fall it is introducing sleep tracking for the Watch. When it launches, it will roll out to tens of millions of users. (Apple will likely soon pass 100 million cumulative Watch sales, if it hasn’t already.) Oura, meanwhile, is approaching 200,000 rings sold.