In the start of my biohacker journey sleep was a big priority and after doing a lot of work with improving my sleeping area and trying various hacks to sleep better i decided to start tracking my sleep to understand what was going on during the night. I started out with the regular sleep apps for smart phones but didn’t find them reliable. Then I started hearing about the OURA ring from a lot of people in the biohacker community. After a couple of months, I decided to get one. I have used the OURA ring and tracked my sleep for approximately 10 months and I really love it. When they launched their new ring with a good pre-order deal I decided to buy it.
What is the oura ring?
For you who don’t know what the OURA ring is. it’s a fitness and sleep tracker, which measures your heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV) body temperature and movements during the night. Based on this data it uses an algorithm to determine your sleep quality and how much of each sleep phase you been in for the night and it can also determine your respiration rate. Based on this data and the daytime fitness or movement date it can also determine your readiness. The readiness score can then be used to adjust your routines and also to spot bad habits or over training.
The new version
So, after using the first ring for quite a while I was exited to get my hands on the new ring and after approximately 7 months of waiting I finally got it. The new ring has some new improvements like better battery life, more processing power and memory, a gyroscope for improved tracking of movement and this tech is now fitted in a much smaller ring. The pictures below shows the new app interface.
Some trouble at first
When the ring arrived, I was super happy after a long wait. But after the ring was charged and i tried to start syncing it to my phone I ran in to some problems. The ring wouldn’t connect to my device after some contact with OURA support, they told me that I needed to download a beta tester app (probably could have found this info by myself). After my conversation with OURA support I finally got the ring working. But even if my ring was connected it had a hard time tracking my sleep in the beginning and connecting to the ring was also a problem. After more talk with the very helpful OURA support and some firmware updates the ring now works much better, even if I sometimes need to update several times before getting the sleep data visible in the app.
What is my verdict?
I loved the first ring and even if I had some problems in the beginning with the new one I still love it. The ring is now working great and some of the new features in the app are cool. My favourite feature of the new app is all the small helpful notifications you get everyday based on your sleep and activity data. It is very useful to be reminded that you shouldn’t push your self to hard if sleep was bad. One of the other big benefits of the new ring is battery life and this for me is a big improvement according to OURA the battery can last up to 10 days without a charge and that is really good for my because I don’t like carrying a charger around with me. The ring will also get new features with coming updates like real-time HR and HRV data. The coming update with more tracking data is the big reason I got the new upgraded OURA, with this data I can do HRV training or track meditation sessions and this is something I’m already doing but on other devices, but it would be nice to be able to do this with one device. I have previously discussed some of the pros and cool features of the OURA ring and now you might wonder about the cons or drawbacks. For me the only drawback is a very personal one that many of you might not agree with and that’s the design. The design is nice, but I liked the design of the old ring more. My reason for that is that this ring looks more like a regular engagement ring. It doesn’t stick out, when I was wearing the old ring people would come and ask about the cool ring I had and wondered what it was. Now it’s just a regular ring, but of course there is a big benefit with a small ring, especially during gym sessions . The old big ring could sometimes feel like it was in way during my gym sessions. Now I don’t even think about it.
Is the OURA the ultimate sleep and performance tracker for biohackers?
I would say it is, the data you can get from the ring is amazing and its very fun to experiment with different sleeping routines and measure the effects of them and finally with the live HR and HRV tracking it’s going to be even better. I have used other apps for sleep tracking, but this is next level shit and worth to mention is that all your data can be stored at OURA cloud where there also is more data to extract if you really want to dig deep. I will post some of my tracking data in later blog posts and show some of my results of various sleep hacks, stay tuned. get your ring at https://ouraring.com/partners/biohacking_collective/
By: Biohackad