The Oura ring will soon be able to assess the age of your heart

Oura has been busy last year releasing several new features – and users of the Gen 3 version of the Smart Ring are about to get two more. In late May, the company will roll out measurements of age and cardiovascular fitness to assess long-term heart health. The emphasis is on the long term.

“The thing about age and cardiovascular fitness is that these are two parameters that you can really impact,” says Shyamal Patel, Oura’s chief scientific officer. Right now, Patel says, Oura’s current feature set is much more focused on your short-term metrics. “With these features, we’re kind of introducing this idea of ​​long-term health. What are the things you are doing today? How do they contribute to your long-term health, your life expectancy, your longevity.

Oura defines cardiovascular age as the age of your vascular system relative to your chronological age. The smart ring has photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors – the green LEDs that many wearable devices use to measure heart rate – and from this sensor it can measure pulse wave speed to determine the arterial stiffness.

The bottom line is that the stiffer your blood vessels are, the less efficient your vascular system is. Your heart has to work harder and your organs experience greater wear and tear because stiffer blood vessels cannot adapt to changes in blood pressure as well as more flexible vessels. After approximately 14 days of tracking, Oura Ring users will receive a display indicating whether you are trending above, below, or in alignment (plus or minus five years) with your chronological age.

Oura’s cardio capacity feature may be a little more familiar to laptop users. Oura Ring owners will be able to take a six-minute test during which they will be asked to walk as fast as they can. From this test, the ring will give you an estimate of VO2 Max.

VO2 Max is a metric that measures your cardiorespiratory health. A higher VO2 Max generally means better performance in endurance sports. As it stands, you’ll usually find this metric highlighted in devices aimed at athletes, like the Whoop 4.0, Garmins, and Polars. However, Oura’s philosophy for VO2 Max intentionally moves away from a sport-centric approach.

“Anything you can do to improve your cardiorespiratory fitness will also have long-term health benefits.” So for us, the approach is more about giving you a window into what that might mean,” says Patel. For example, the app will tell you how it will feel to climb five flights of stairs in 10 years on your current trajectory, compared to one where you improve your VO2 Max.

The timing of these features cannot be ignored either. After years of being the dominant player in the space, the smart ring space is starting to heat up. Most notably, Samsung announced that it will launch its first smart ring later this year. Under these conditions, it makes sense that Oura would be keen to expand its expertise and reputation by investing heavily in scientific research. (Cardiovascular age, for example, was a passion project of one of its biomedical engineers that took several years of testing and development.) The company also recently launched a lab feature, which allows its users to participate in beta features such as early disease detection. Patel says the company has other projects in the works, with further updates planned for 2025.