Skip to main content

The Oura Ring now tells you if you really are a night owl or an early bird

As part of its most recent update, the Oura Ring will let you know whether you’re going against type by confirming if you really are an early bird or a night owl. It’ll do this using a metric called Chronotype, which examines our natural sleep patterns and energy levels, and then correctly assigns you the right designation. Oura says that understanding this, and working with it to improve your sleep patterns, can have a “profound impact on our lives.”

Top-down view of the Oura Ring Horizon.
Oura Ring Horizon Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Chronotype is the first of several sleep-related updates coming to the Oura Ring in time for Sleep Awareness Week. Currently, the Oura Ring shows you’ve had good or bad sleep, but will now add in a “fair” measurement too. This will be reflected in its simple-to-read graphs, where a blue line indicates good performance, and a red line shows bad performance. The fair measurement will appear as a yellow line.

The Readiness score will gain a new indicator called Sleep Regularity, which takes an overall look at your sleep from the previous two weeks, so you can better see how disruptions can impact ongoing sleep patterns. The Sleep Score also now takes into account times when the optimum amount of sleep isn’t possible due to lifestyle or work commitments, making the overall Sleep Score more useful to more people.

Finally, and linking back to the new Chronotype feature, Body Clock helps you find the right sleep routine and schedule. Paired with understanding your Chronotype, Oura says this will help, “improve sleep quality, increase energy levels, and have a better sense of balance and satisfaction.” It will even provide insight into the best times for activity, focus, and restorative time.

Oura says the new features will be part of the Oura App, which will require an update through the app store soon. It’s not clear if the Ring will need a firmware update to activate these features, but the app should alert you if one is necessary. The Oura Ring has a monthly subscription attached to it, after the initial purchase price and grace period, so additional features and large updates like this help make it more appealing to own and use long term.

Editors' Recommendations

More than 5 billion mobile phones to become waste this year
A pile of e-waste.

What do you do with your old phone when you replace it? If you’re one of the responsible folks who trade it in or recycle it, then good for you.

But according to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum, most mobile phones that get switched off for good simply disappear into drawers, closets, and garages, or get chucked into trash cans bound for landfills or incineration.

Read more
The Happy Ring is a smart mood ring that tracks stress, not steps
Happy Ring and charger, seen with a concept of the app.

There are plenty of wearables you can strap to various parts of your body to monitor activity and fitness, but the Happy Ring wants to be the first to prioritize monitoring your mood and stress levels.

The smart ring is the first product from Happy Health, a technology company founded by, among others, Dr. Dustin Freckleton and Sean Rad. Freckleton has already experimented with wearable tech, having been part of the troubled hydration monitoring LVL wearable project, while Rad is best known for founding the dating app Tinder.

Read more
Is the Oura Ring finally good enough to replace your Apple Watch?
Oura Ring, iPhone 13 Pro, and Apple Watch Series 7.

I regularly wear the Oura Ring and the Apple Watch Series 7 together, as one fills in the gaps the other has in its arsenal of features. Through two recent updates, the Oura smart ring has increased its ability to monitor health and fitness with the addition of simple fitness tracking and SpO2 blood oxygen monitoring. Is the Oura Ring now a full-fledged health and fitness tracker ready to be worn on its own, without any compromises?
New features
Both the workout tracking and the SpO2 blood oxygen monitoring have been promised since the launch of the third-generation ring in 2021, so their arrival is overdue. The workout mode employs the ring’s heart rate tracking and came to the ring at the end of May, while the Sp02 feature came at the end of July. Once you set the feature up, it works automatically.

The workout mode is quite simple as it only looks at your heart rate to assess intensity, and doesn’t seem to use the accelerometer to cover movement, making it relatively basic when compared to other wearables. The SpO2 monitoring works when you’re asleep. With it, the Oura Ring also tracks Breathing Regularity — helping to identify changes in your breathing patterns overnight, which may be indications of sleep-related problems like sleep apnea.

Read more