A good health tracker should really only have two main goals: provide accurate tracking and be comfortable.
The accuracy bit feels fairly black and white. For a health device to be useful, the data it collects needs to be correct. But the comfort element is more nuanced. In the past decade-plus that health trackers have become ever-increasingly popular, I’ve tried my fair share of them, and there has not been one I felt I could wear nonstop day in and day out.
The Oura Ring 5, which was released on June 4, isn’t perfect, but the fifth-generation smart ring has gotten closer than any health tracker before it in becoming a gadget that you don’t need to or want to take off.
Oura Ring 5
The Oura Ring 5 outdoes itself and other smart rings with a significantly smaller design, greater comfort, and superior health tracking.
Pros
Cons
On the hardware side, the biggest update is that the smart ring is 40% smaller and lighter than its predecessor, the Ring 4. This makes the Oura Ring 5 the slimmest smart ring currently on the market, and one of the smallest wearables available.
$399 gets you a black or silver model or $499 for the brushed silver, deep rose, gold, or stealth versions. This isn’t all that different from the price of the Oura 4 when it first came out in 2024, when the price ranged from $349 for a silver or black model to $499 for the gold and rose gold.
Before testing out the Oura Ring 5, I had been wearing either the Apple Watch or the Oura 4 Ceramic. Both of them fulfilled their purposes—the Apple Watch tracked my running workouts and the Oura 4 gave me a deeper dive into my sleep, heart rate variability, and overall health—but they were never something that I got used to wearing. I could never ‘forget I was wearing it’ like the devices are meant to do. I could never sleep well with a Whoop or an Apple Watch strapped to my wrist, nor could I shower or do the dishes with the Oura Ring 4 loosely stuck to my finger for fear that it would slip off.
It turns out for comfort, smaller wearables really are better. The Oura Ring 5 is 6.09mm wide and 2.28mm thick. Ffor comparison, the Oura Ring 4 is 7.9mm wide and roughly 2.88mm thick, according to Oura. This degree of downsizing really does make a difference. I found that, for the first time ever, I stopped noticing that I was wearing it, and when I did, it didn’t bother me.
Not only does this mean that the Oura Ring 5 is more comfortable to wear, but it also means that it’ll actually do the job it is meant to do. (It’s impossible for a wearable to track your sleep if you find it so uncomfortable that you end up taking it off in the middle of the night without remembering you did so.)
According to Oura, the Ring 5 includes more powerful LED sensors that should translate into more consistent heart rate readings and has stronger signal pathways that should be more accurate on different finger types and skin tones.
There are a few other small improvements on the hardware side that are worth noting. The Oura Ring 5 is waterproof up to 100 meters and is IP68-rated, which means you can do most normal, everyday things like showering, exercising, and washing your hands and dishes, and you can even go in a sauna without damaging it. All of this is fairly standard for wearables these days. This rating doesn’t mean that the smart ring is indestructible, however, as Oura advises against things like scuba diving or jet skiing. Even so, I did find myself a tad bit nervous at first showering or doing dishes with the Ring 5 on as I was worried soap would make it accidentally slip off, but it never did.
The battery life also got a bump. The Oura Ring 4 boasted a total battery life of about five to seven days, and I found that to be pretty accurate. With all-day use, I only need to charge it around every fifth day. The Oura Ring 5 increases that battery life to anywhere from six to nine days. Over the past few weeks that I’ve been testing, I found that one battery charge would get me to around six days, and that was with heavy use; I logged all my workouts and daily walks and never took it off for the night. The other nice thing about the battery is that charging it is fairly quick. A full recharge usually took me about one hour, and over the past several days I experimented with daily recharges, which took about 15 minutes or less.
The proprietary charger itself is fairly unchanged from Oura’s previous iteration, and the most annoying thing about it still exists. While the smart ring easily clicks into place on the charging pad, there’s no lock or magnet strong enough to hold it down. The Oura Ring 5 literally falls out if you flip the charger upside down, which means you could lose it more easily if, say, it was unintentionally knocked off. To that end, Oura does sell a travel case that closes shut, which you could use as your regular charger, too, but it will cost you an extra $100 and only works with your specific ring size. For example, a size 8 ring is incompatible with a charger designed for a size 7 ring. The regular charger works this way, too.
The entire premise behind making the Oura Ring smaller is to get people to wear it every day, all day long, and I think the hardware really succeeds on that front. The other component, though, is creating software that makes wearing the smart ring all day actually worth it—and Oura keeps going in the right direction on this front, too.
For example, I found that the Oura Ring 5’s sleep tracking excels at accurately identifying when I’ve fallen asleep versus when I am lying in bed staring at my phone. This feature made me realize just how much less sleep I am getting than I thought I was.
The Oura Ring 5’s sleep tracking provides a ton of other data, as it did with previous models. This data is not all that different from other wearables on the market. Because I’ve tracked my sleep over extended periods of time on numerous wearables, I’ve come to realize that I am far less interested in the nitty-gritty of my sleep these days. This is probably because I’ve seen it all before and the novelty really does wear off. I’m more interested in my overall sleep score and how it correlates with my tried and true, low-tech method for grading my own sleep: literally asking myself how refreshed I feel. Most of the time, the Oura Ring 5 objective data aligns with how I subjectively feel. And when it doesn’t, I usually just stick with my gut.
The Oura 5 also includes the Oura Advisor, which is the company’s AI-powered personal health companion, which came out last year. You can ask it questions like, “How was my sleep this week?” or “Has my activity level changed this week?” and it will give you a detailed, conversational response and make suggestions on how to improve. The Advisor is fun, but it requires work on your part to ask it questions. As such, I honestly didn’t find myself turning to it or even needing it after I had reviewed my day’s activity or sleep. The Oura Ring 5 also has a women’s health AI companion, which functions in a similar way.
Other new features that are included in the subscription include Health Radar, which is an update to the Symptom Radar introduced in 2024, which aims to use biometric data to detect shifts that might indicate the user is coming down with an illness. The most exciting and innovative component of Health Radar is the blood pressure monitoring feature, which is called Blood Pressure Signals. Currently, the feature is still in its clinical testing phase. So, in order to use it, you have to opt into the blood pressure profile study. You need at least a month of continuous sleep data, so I’m currently still waiting on that.
The main idea behind the new feature is that it uses shifts in blood flow to estimate your chances of having high blood pressure during that period. A traditional blood pressure cuff measures blood pressure by temporarily stopping blood flow in an artery and then slowly releasing the pressure to spot when blood flow resumes. But the Oura Ring 5 focuses on certain shifts in blood flow patterns that correlate with high blood pressure. For instance, because a higher blood pressure can cause arteries to become more stiff, this often results in characteristic changes in blood flow patterns over time, which is what the smart ring is trying to detect.
Oura seems to be going all-in on preventative health and longevity. In addition to blood pressure tracking, it has a nighttime breathing feature that spots changes in breathing that could affect sleep. The Oura Ring 5 has a feature that allows users who are using GLP-1 medications to track their medication dosage. Users can also upload recent blood work as part of a new feature called Health Panels.
It’s a lot of data—too much data to track and follow every single day. I am eager to see in the future if Oura offers a way to opt out of receiving so much data and tracking and instead provide users with a single overall grade of some sort on a weekly basis. Otherwise, if I tried to keep up with all the readings of my own health every day, I am certain I would eventually succumb to health-tracking burnout.
Oura sells itself as a health tracker and not a fitness watch. Nevertheless, in some ways, it still tries to do it all. In its newest iteration, for example, the Oura Ring 5 has automatic activity tracking that, if you go for a run, for example, the smart ring records your distance and pace (though you need to have your phone connected via Bluetooth in close proximity). This is a nice feature for someone who is casually running and doesn’t care much about their speed or the number of miles they are logging. That, of course, means the Oura Ring 5 is no match for a fitness or running watch where you can see your pace and distance with a simple flip of your wrist.
In a similar light, if you are weightlifting, it’s best advised from a safety standpoint to remove your smart ring, which means the workout doesn’t get recorded. You can manually add it in after the fact, and the app now supports select third-party heart rate monitors.
On a practical note, the Oura Ring 5 still requires a monthly subscription, and there are other smart rings on the market that don’t, which may seem more appealing if you are trying to keep your monthly subscriptions low. The membership is $5.99 a month or $69.99 a year. Technically, you can use the smart ring without a subscription, but you would only get access to the Readiness, Activity, and Sleep scores as well as the ring battery and basic profile and settings. For some people, though, that is honestly enough. But if you are interested in doing anything that involves more in-depth tracking, you’ll need a subscription.
Overall, the biggest upgrade to the Oura Ring 5 is its smaller size, which isn’t something to diminish. For me, it means that I can comfortably wear the smart ring constantly and consistently, which lets me get the most benefit out of the software.
If you already have an Oura Ring and are thinking about upgrading, this could be the time to do it. I find it unlikely that a smart ring could get all that much smaller than it already is without significantly compromising its abilities. Regardless, the Oura Ring 5 seems to have achieved its goal on the comfort front.
Source: Gizmodo