Oura CEO Tom Hale recently sat down with the Wall Street Journal to answer questions about the Oura Ring, and it was exactly as fascinating as you would expect. There are serious bits about health tracking and the future of AI doctors, but let’s address the elephant in the room first.
Can the Oura Ring detect sex?
Let’s get straight to the spicy stuff. The Oura Ring can technically make a pretty good prediction about whether you are, as Hale diplomatically puts it, engaged in that particular activity.
But the company has made a very deliberate decision not to go there. However, users can manually tag an activity as sex in the app, so it’s not entirely off the table if that is something important to you.
The funnier part is what the ring misidentifies as sex. Hale shared that the Oura team discovered on Reddit that wrestling and horseback riding are the two activities most commonly flagged as, well, intimate activities. Hale shared this with a straight face and then said, “I’ll leave it there. You can draw your own conclusions.”
What else is the CEO spilling?
Beyond the spicy stuff, Hale had some genuinely interesting things to say. Sleep is the metric he cares about most, calling it the foundation of all health and recovery. Glucose, however, is his personal obsession, and it has cost him dearly.
On the hardware front, Hale also talked about the upcoming Oura Ring 5, which is about 40% smaller than older versions and is aimed at people with smaller hands and men who want something closer to a wedding band in size.
And in the biggest reveal of all, Hale teased an AI clinician coming to the app because, apparently, the future of healthcare is a smart ring that knows more about your body than you do and can offer preventive care advice.
It’s the sign of the times to come. Recently, Samsung launched its own AI health coach, and Google’s Fitbit Air is doing the same. I am still not convinced by all these AI health coaches, and only time will tell which of them are actually beneficial and which are just riding the AI hype train.