Oura is moving respiratory disease detection functionality from beta to Ring Gen 3 e Ring 4 carriers. Users with an active subscription should be able to take advantage of this Symptom radar by December 11th
Oura began publicly testing the feature earlier this year. The idea is that Symptom Radar looks at parameters including resting heart rate, skin temperature, sleep data and breathing rate to see if there are any differences compared to the baseline statistics. If so, Oura may let you know that it has detected possible common cold or flu symptoms and offer suggestions on how to rest and recover, such as putting your device into sleep mode so you aren’t prompted to meet activity goals.
Following feedback from beta testers, Oura has added a couple of extra features to Symptom Radar. It now has a history graph that shows wellness trends and whether your daily Symptom Radar result has been recorded (this should happen when a ring syncs with the Oura app every morning). There’s also a breakdown of each biometric input for those who want more granular details on which indicators have changed and by how much.
Like wellness tracking features on other wearables, such as electrocardiogram readings on smart watches, this is not designed to make any kind of diagnosis. Instead, the goal is to inform you of the warning signs that may indicate a cold or flu so that you can take action. Oura claims that “Symptom Radar can detect signs of tension accurately and precisely, up to two days before a member selects an illness-related tag” in its tagging feature.
Symptom Radar comes from Oura’s work on COVID-19 detection, in which researchers found that the company’s smart rings were able to predict symptoms of the virus up to three days before with an accuracy of 90%. This led to the creation of the Oura healthcare management platform and then a refined algorithm “based on a significantly augmented dataset, comprising millions of tags, which significantly increased accuracy to produce the new Symptom Radar functionality.”
While features like Symptom Radar might be helpful in detecting respiratory illnesses, it’s still worth listening to your intuition and trusting your knowledge of your body. After all, Shyamal Patel, Oura’s head of science, said so The limit that the algorithm is not 100% accurate and therefore false positive and negative readings are possible. The company has yet to disclose data on the accuracy of Symptom Radar.
Correction, December 5, 2024, 3:57 pm ET: The availability date was incorrectly listed as December 9 in an earlier version of this story. It has been changed.
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