I was intrigued talking to a friend about the first generation Ōura ring he had and decided I wanted to try it out for myself. I also had a Fitbit Charge HR and an Android Wear (not WearOS because they didn’t update it, I’m not bitter) watch that I was using. I figured a comparison is in order! All of the following data can be found on this Google Docs Spreadsheet.
One feature that Oura champions is heart rate tracking. Because the ring is snugly on your finger, they can do some cool stuff with tracking how variable your heart rate is, they also use the HR data for tracking sleep (just like Fitbit does). So here is how the Resting Heart Rate compares with the Oura and Fitbit:
It looks like the Fitbit is taking a longer average rate, while Oura is doing a shorter sample window but I’d say they’re both showing similar things.
Speaking of heart rate, let’s see how sleep tracking compares. In this graph, I’ve added the values from Sleep As Android, a sleep tracking program that I run on my phone as an alarm clock and tracks sleep. I actually have data going back to 2015 (I sleep more now since I quit my day job and stopped going to work at 5:30 am). Sleep As Android added support for using an Android Wear/Wear OS watch for tracking movement and heart rate to indicate sleep cycles, otherwise you stick your phone on your mattress and it measures the movement.
The plots for Fitbit and for Oura are REALLY close. Easily within a reasonable margin of error. SAA + the watch tracks at about the same, except it shows me sleeping about 0.5-1 hours longer on a given day. I suspect that the Fitbit or Oura data is more accurate since both are far more consistent with their heart rate data. SAA will often not show HR data at all.
OK, what about activity tracking? I’m right-handed and have Google Fit tracking on my left hand with Fitbit and Oura on my right. Fitbit has an option to select “handedness” – if you wear the tracker on your dominant wrist, it lowers the sensitivity to account for more non-step movement from that hand.
I’m guessing that having my Fitbit on the dominant hand with the lowered sensitivity accounts for the consistently lower numbers from Fitbit.
So what’s the take-away from this? It seems that the Oura ring is a very comparable sleep and activity tracker. The Fitbit has some other features that are lacking in the Oura (Social challenges against other users, differences in workout tracking, no way am I wearing the Oura while weight lifting) but I think I’m done wearing two watches – the Oura works good enough. If you happen to work in a profession where the ONLY allowed jewelry is a ring, the Oura would be phenomenal.
Thank you for this review….I loved the sleep tracking that my Jawbone Up did. I never really did an analysis of it’s accuracy but it did try to identify REM sleep.
I actually really liked the Jawbone UP I had back in 2014 or so. The best thing was the “Nap” function. I think it was something like “hit the button 3 times and it will wake you up in 20 minutes” it was fantastic.
I think the Oura Ring way over-counts activity: Yesterday I was on the Peloton, and I had a 45 min spin, with an average cadence of 72. that means, simplistically, 144 “steps” per minute, or 6,480 for 45 minutes. So, for 45 minutes the OURA ring (which was tucked into one of my socks, as otherwise it would not have measured anything) measured 13,000+ “steps”, whereas Peloton measured 6,480. Peloton is definitely more accurate and the Oura Ring is way off.
I have found that the FitBit Surge is quite accurate, so tomorrow I’ll check both sets of ##s, put the Fitbit around one ankle and the Oura ring in the sock on the other ankle, and after another 45 min spin I’ll see what I come up with. Will post a follow up.
I believe for accurate measuring it needs to monitor your pulse too, you may need to put it on a toe.