Oura is moving its respiratory illness detection feature out of beta and rolling it out to Ring Gen 3 and Ring 4 wearers. Symptom Radar will be available to users with an active subscription by December 11th.
Oura began public testing of this feature earlier this year. The idea is that Symptom Radar looks at metrics like resting heart rate, skin temperature, sleep data, and breathing rate to see if there are any differences from your baseline statistics. If you have symptoms, Oura will notify you that it has detected possible common cold- or flu-like symptoms and give you a chance to rest, including putting your device into hibernation mode so you won’t be asked to participate in activities. We may offer suggestions on how to recover. the goal.
Following feedback from beta testers, Oura has added several additional features to Symptom Radar. You’ll see a history graph showing your health trends and whether your daily symptom radar results were recorded (this happens every morning when your ring syncs with the Oura app). A breakdown of each biometric input is also shown for those who want a more detailed view of which markers were changed and by how much.
Like other wearable health detection features, such as electrocardiogram readings on smartwatches, this is not designed to perform any kind of diagnosis. Instead, the idea is to notify you of warning signs that a cold or flu is coming so you can take precautions. Oura claims that with its tagging feature, “Symptom Radar can accurately and precisely detect signs of stress up to two days before a member selects a disease-related tag.”
Symptom Radar stems from Oura’s research into COVID-19 detection, where researchers found the company’s smart ring could predict virus symptoms up to three days early with 90% accuracy. This led to the creation of Oura’s health management platform, which also uses sophisticated algorithms “with vastly increased accuracy to generate new symptom radar capabilities, based on a significantly increased dataset containing millions of tags.” It led to
While features like symptom radar can help detect respiratory illnesses, it’s still worth listening to your intuition and trusting what you know about your body. After all, Oura’s head of science, Shyamal Patel, told The Verge that the algorithm is not 100% accurate and can result in false positives and false positives. The company has not yet disclosed accuracy data for Symptom Radar.
Correction, December 5, 2024, 3:57 PM ET: A previous version of this article incorrectly listed the availability date as December 9. Revised.
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