Oura’s got new tools to help you manage long-term stress

Smart ring maker Oura introduced stress tracking to its platform in 2023. Today, the company announced that it’s building on these shorter-term stress features with an upcoming tool that’s meant to give you insight into how your body is handling stress over time. Oura’s also taking the first steps to develop features that’ll warn users when their blood pressure may be creeping up.

In a press release, Oura detailed a busy end to the year. Over the next few weeks, Oura will be rolling out a new Cumulative Stress feature, improvements to its Cycle Insights, and a major update to its app. It’s also kicking off a study to develop a feature it’s calling Blood Pressure Profile, which combine trends measured by Oura Ring wearables with questionnaire responses to give users a rough idea of whether their blood pressure may be cause for concern.

Cumulative Stress is coming to the Oura app for all users “in the coming weeks.”

Wearables like the Oura Ring 4 can’t directly measure stress, but by looking at trends in data that can be measured — like heart rate, heart rate variability, and body temperature — Oura can put together estimates of your body’s stress response in the short term. Cumulative Stress takes into account certain additional sleep and activity data and uses established self-report stress questionnaires like the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory to “highlight the often ‘hidden toll’ of unmanaged strain” over time.

An app redesign will land at the same time, along with a new Stress Management view that groups all your stress-related data in one spot.

The redesign also comes with Cycle Insights improvements: Oura is expanding its window of period and fertility predictions from its current one-month span to a full year. Users will also start getting predictions after wearing their Oura ring for one night — a big departure from the 60 nights currently required.

Oura’s also working to bring blood pressure management to its platform. Unlike stress, some wearables can directly measure blood pressure — but the smart rings on the market today can’t. Instead, the Blood Pressure Profile feature Oura is developing will combine the data its rings measure with answers from user surveys about things like lifestyle and family health history to provide a broad estimate of a user’s risk for high blood pressure.

It’s early days for Blood Pressure Profile. Oura says that users enrolled in Oura Labs will be invited to join an Institutional Review Board-approved study about the feature in the next few months.