Oura is moving a respiratory sickness detection feature out of beta and rolling it out to Ring Gen 3 and Ring 4 wearers. Users with an active subscription should be able to take advantage of Symptom Radar by December 11.
Oura started publicly testing the feature earlier this year. The idea is that Symptom Radar looks at metrics including resting heart rate, skin temperature, sleep data and breathing rate to see if there are any differences from your baseline stats. If there are, Oura may let you know that it has detected possible common cold- or flu-like symptoms and offer suggestions on how to rest up and recover, such as putting your device into rest 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 showing wellness trends and whether the daily Symptom Radar result has been recorded (this should happen when a ring syncs with the Oura app each morning). There’s also a breakdown of each biometric input for those who want more granular detail on which markers have changed and by how much.
Like wellness detection features on other wearables, such as electrocardiogram readings on smart watches, this isn’t designed to make any kind of diagnosis. Instead, the aim is notify you of warning signs that a cold or flu may be about to hit so you can take action. Oura claims “Symptom Radar can detect signs of strain accurately and precisely, up to two days before a member selects an illness-related tag” in its tagging feature.
Symptom Radar stems 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 early with 90 percent accuracy. That led into the creation of Oura’s health management platform and then to a refined algorithm “based on a vastly increased data set, inclusive of millions of tags, that has significantly up-leveled accuracy to produce the new Symptom Radar feature.”
While features such as Symptom Radar could be helpful in detecting respiratory sickness, it’s still worth listening to your intuition and trusting your knowledge of your own body. After all, Shyamal Patel, Oura’s head of science, told The Verge that the algorithm isn’t 100 percent accurate, and as such false positive and negative readings are possible. The company has yet to disclose accuracy data for Symptom Radar.
Correction, December 5, 2024, 3:57pm ET: The availability date was incorrectly stated to be December 9 in a prior version of this story. It has been amended.
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