Smart ring supremo Oura is launching a new feature that measures the user's ability to withstand stress - Resilience.
The new addition joins the company's Daily Stress feature that launched back in October, and uses this metric alongside daytime recovery insights and sleep stats to provide a Resilience grade.
Like with Daily Stress, which uses four gradings - Stressed, Engaged, Relaxed, or Restored - to summarise your body's physiological response, Resilience doesn't categorize your response with a score.
Instead, it will describe it as Limited, Adequate, Solid, Strong or Exceptional.
Insights and suggestions will also be present in the app to help Oura Ring users increase their resilience, with the trend line also showing how this fluctuates throughout the week, as shown below.
Oura
With this latest addition, stress tracking continues to become an increasingly prominent part of the Oura experience - not bad for a device that doesn't feature an EDA sensor like some wearables that prioritize logging stress responses.
The company has also said that it's been able to glean plenty of interesting data from its users since it launching Daytime Stress and Reflections last year.
On average, users experience 96.5 minutes of stress per day, while Friday and Saturday are more likely to be stressful due to increased activity.
Alcohol proves to be a big factor, too, with users who mentioned alcohol experiencing a higher average duration of stress - 138.5 minutes - compared to the average.
With Samsung recently announcing the Galaxy Ring and smart ring startups like Ultrahuman and Movano now threatening, Oura is under pressure to keep delivering a compelling experience - particularly given that it's only accessible with a paid subscription.
To its credit, significant features have been added consistently over the last 18 months - though we suspect an Oura Ring 4 will have to arrive at some point to help take features like Daily Stress and this new Resilience metric to the next level.
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Conor moved to Wareable Media Group in 2017, initially covering all the latest developments in smartwatches, fitness trackers, and VR. He made a name for himself writing about trying out translation earbuds on a first date and cycling with a wearable airbag, as well as covering the industry’s latest releases.
Following a stint as Reviews Editor at Pocket-lint, Conor returned to Wareable Media Group in 2022 as Editor-at-Large. Conor has become a wearables expert, and helps people get more from their wearable tech, via Wareable's considerable how-to-based guides.
He has also contributed to British GQ, Wired, Metro, The Independent, and The Mirror.