Summary
- Oura Ring 4 continuously tracks your sleep, activity, and health with the same form factor as a regular ring.
- The ring is comfortable, wearable during activities in and out of water, durable, and tracks data accurately.
- The app provides detailed health metrics, personalized advice, automatic activity detection, and alerts for potential health issues.
Sleep, health, and activity trackers take many forms, most of which are obtrusive. The Oura Ring 4, on the other hand, is practically indistinguishable from a regular ring yet has many of the same benefits as less elegant trackers.
Oura Ring 4
The Oura Ring 4 is a comprehensive tracker for more than 20 fitness metrics, offers optimal sleep time suggestions, nightly SpO2 tracking, stress level monitoring, and more.
- Unobtrusive sleep, activity, and health tracking
- As comfortable as a regular ring
- Good battery life
- Subscription required for most features
- Ring shows light scratches
- Information can be a bit overwhelming at times
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Price and Availability
The Oura Ring 4 is available from Amazon, Best Buy, or direct from Oura, starting at $350 and going to as high as $500 depending upon color choice. It comes with the ring, USB-C to USB-C charging cable, charging dock, and paperwork.
It’s recommended that you get an Oura Ring 4 Sizing Kit first to make sure the ring is the correct size. If you purchase the sizing kit from Amazon or Best Buy, it costs $10, which counts as credit towards the purchase of the actual ring. If you order direct through Oura, the sizing kit is included with your selected ring order.
Once the kit arrives, you test the size that fits snugly but comfortably for 24 hours, then either let Oura know, which triggers shipment, or purchase the desired ring from Amazon or Best Buy with your $10 credit, as applicable. If you order through Oura, you’ll also be offered a one-year prepaid app membership for $70, which is HSA/FSA eligible, otherwise you get 1 month free, which is normally $6 per month. Non-paying Oura Ring 4 owners get access to three simple daily scores for sleep, readiness, and activity in the app, as well as access to interactive and educational content.
The Oura Ring 4 comes with one year of coverage for accidental damage and other issues, but you can add a two-year extended protection plan for $45 or a three-year extended protection plan for $60. To use my own purchase directly from Oura as an example, I chose the Stealth color, one-year prepaid membership, and three-year extended protection plan with New Jersey tax for a total of $575.39.
Fit and Design: Just Like a Regular Ring
Because the Oura Ring 4 is shaped like a regular ring, sizing is similar. I chose my left ring finger, which is usually a size 10.5. There are no half sizes for the Ring 4, but I found size 10, rather than 11, a good fit.
While Oura says to wear the sizing ring for 24 hours, I wore it until the real ring came. As expected, the real ring, which is made of titanium, feels much better than the plastic sizing ring, so it proved an easy transition. At 0.3 mm in height, it’s a bit thicker than my regular platinum or silicone rings I would wear on the same finger, but nothing too excessive, especially considering all of the tech inside.
Although it could benefit from being just a bit thinner in the next generation, it’s safe to say that, like Apple arguably did with the Apple Watch series, Oura got the shape of the Ring 4 just right. It’s an area in which even some of the newest competitors, like the RingConn Gen 2 Air, lag, with shapes that aren’t quite like that of a regular ring and take more getting used to.
The exterior of the ring is smooth, save for an oval dimple that’s meant to face the palm of your hand. The interior is also mostly smooth save for some minor sensor bumps and dimples, which are not something I ever felt when wearing the ring.
The Ring 4 is meant to be worn all day, every day. It’s water-resistant up to 328 feet, so it can be worn while showering, swimming, or snorkeling. It’s not rated for scuba diving or being submerged in water for more than 12 hours. While I do occasionally shower with the Ring 4, I find the soap can make it slip off my finger. As such, I mostly just hand-wash the ring and take it off before showering.
Operating temperature ranges are from 14 – 125° F, so it’s generally safe for hot tubs, saunas, ice baths, and cryotherapy tanks. Exposure to more extreme temperatures may lead to battery damage, but, in general, it’s a pretty durable bit of tech.
One of the natural uses for the Ring 4 is when working out. Oura does recommend not wearing the ring when lifting heavy weights, as it may get scratched. As an avid weight lifter who wore a silicone ring for many years, I ignored this advice and wore the Ring 4 when grasping metal bars, creating small but noticeable scratches when inspected up close. Still, outside of that specific use case, which, again, Oura specifically warns against, I haven’t found anything that seems to do noticeable damage to the exterior of the ring.
Set Up and Software: Your Phone’s Companion
The Oura app requires a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled iOS device running Apple iOS 15 or higher or an Android device running Android 9 or higher with Google Play Services. The Ring 4 collects data for up to two weeks even when in Airplane mode or not connected to the app, but it needs to be in Bluetooth range in order to sync. Most of the data the Ring 4 collects can also be viewed on a web page after logging in, but the app is meant as the primary reference.
The setup is straightforward. After downloading the app to the device of your choice, you connect the charger to a USB-C power source, place the ring on the charger, and follow the directions in the app. The Ring 4 is fully charged when the light on the charging dock turns green, which is typically after 20 – 80 minutes, depending upon the starting level.
The Oura app will ask you to enter basic health details and reflect on your sleep, lifestyle, and what you’d like to achieve so it can build a base profile. On an iOS device, it will optionally ask to connect to the Health app, while on Android it will ask to connect to Health Connect.
Either Health app connection is recommended so health and activity data can be leveraged between other devices and the Ring 4, creating a more complete picture. In my own case, I also wear an Apple Watch Ultra, which is a more complete fitness tracker than the Ring 4, but not something I want to wear all of the time, like to bed, where it would sometimes scratch my face.
Oura says it takes about two weeks for the Ring 4 to learn your habits and adjust to your tendencies, so it’s recommended to wear it every day for at least that long. Again, if you don’t mind normally wearing a ring every day, wearing the Ring 4 should be no different.
Functionality: Accurate and Actionable Monitoring
The Oura Ring 4 monitors heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), temperature, activity, and sleep. Because the Ring 4 sits directly on your finger rather than the underside of your wrist like a watch or other wearable, it can capture data more accurately.
For instance, the Ring 4 measures the arteries in your finger to capture signals directly from your heart. Similarly, it uses infrared light photoplethysmography (PPG), rather than just the green light LEDs found in other wearables, to measure deeper for more accurate HRV data.
The Ring 4 has a sampling rate of 50Hz and can maintain continuous data collection over multiple days. This means, for example, that the Ring 4 can measure temperature every minute, making it better able to reflect changes in your physiology rather than the environment.
All of this data that gets captured would be interesting enough on its own, but the Oura app can provide actual context and meaningful, personalized advice. It was all a bit overwhelming at first, but I eventually came to appreciate the information presented in the app genuinely.
The three main app tabs, or sections, are: Today, Vitals, and My Health. Today surfaces important information about your health, which is continuously updated throughout the day. Each day is different, with information that’s most relevant at the moment.
For example, as I’m writing this review late at night when I’d normally be getting ready for bed, it presented a card summarizing my daytime stress, which it indicated stayed between the Engaged and Relaxed zones for most of the day, with me still in the Engaged state at the moment. It recommended I carve out some time to truly relax before bed. Good advice for sure.
Vitals provides a card-based view into different health metrics with a deeper dive into scores. These metrics include readiness, sleep, activity goals, daytime heart rate, and daytime stress, as well as cycles for those who menstruate. These cards can be expanded to see more information, like contributors, insight messages, and historical data.
My Health provides a more streamlined view of long-term metrics like cardiovascular age, stress resilience, and trends. Included in this are sleep regularity and chronotype to help you visualize sleep patterns and behaviors so you can take meaningful action for better rest.
Because of the sensitivity of the Ring 4, it does a good job of automatically detecting and requesting confirmation of dozens of activities like basketball, horseback riding, housework, walking, and stretching. Naturally, you can manually add other activities or any activities it doesn’t detect for whatever reason, and it will also import any activities picked up by other devices that leverage iOS Health or Android Health Connect.
While the Ring 4 wasn’t always perfect with automatically detecting every type of activity, I found it to be highly accurate in determining not only when I went to sleep for the night but also when I napped during the day. It all comes down to how well the ring is able to monitor your vitals.
For instance, there’s a feature called Symptom Radar that helps identify early signs of strain in your body, allowing you to take proactive steps toward rest, recovery, and potentially avoiding getting sick. While in my case, it wasn’t able to detect I was getting sick before I got sick with a heavy cold for two weeks, it did accurately note that my biometrics, including resting heart rate, body temperature, respiratory rate, and REM sleep were outside of my normal range when ill. When I started to feel better, the data reflected my improvements until my vitals were back within my normal range, and I was no longer sick.
With its constant monitoring in such a small form factor, battery life is surprisingly good. While Oura promised up to eight days, I was getting closer to half that based on my heavy usage. I found a best practice was to set up the charger by my night stand and charge it every night for 15 – 30 minutes as I was preparing for bed. By doing so, my ring is almost always fully charged as I put it back on and go to sleep for the night.
Should You Buy the Oura Ring 4?
It’s difficult to detail all of the information that the Oura Ring 4 provides in a review like this. It’s a truly staggering amount of data. Through their app, Oura does a good job of consolidating all of this information and providing recommended actions, like correctly guessing that my resting heart was lowered late one night because of an evening snack and that maybe I should consider eating earlier to give my digestive system enough time to do its job. It’s the type of data that’s genuinely useful.
Although the Ring 4 has premium pricing and a subscription is required for the most interesting features, it’s hard to argue with the value of the seamless design or how comprehensive the app is. If you’re serious about tracking your sleep, activity, and overall health and don’t mind wearing a ring, there’s a lot to love about this device.
Oura Ring 4
The Oura Ring 4 is a comprehensive tracker for more than 20 fitness metrics, offers optimal sleep time suggestions, nightly SpO2 tracking, stress level monitoring, and more.
