The newest fitness tracker craze seems to be smart rings. They’ve been around for a while now, with Oura arguably the most popular option. I’ve used one, and while it’s great – it isn’t perfect.
My biggest problem has been with the Automatic Activity Detection feature, or (in my experience) lack thereof. But this free update for all users fixes this problem, along with plenty of other improvements across the board.
The update includes a reworked step-counting algorithm that ditches estimated steps in favour of actual pedometer-style tracking. I don’t know why this wasn’t here to begin with, but at least it’s arrived now. Oura also tuned up how it tracks active calories, now factoring in heart rate to better understand the intensity of your movement.
Crucially, Automatic Activity Detection has been tweaked to work at any time of day, including very early morning jogs. You can also backdate workouts from up to seven days ago, a handy feature for those of us to forget to log them at the time. This means your Readiness and Activity scores will actually reflect reality now – not just what the ring decides to notice.
If you’re into tracking your running splits, there are new views for that too. Plus, Oura’s using your phone’s data to pad out runs and walks with more detail. There’s even a new trend view to make sense of your active minutes. There’s also a nice sprinkle of additional third-party integrations. The ring now plays nice with CorePower Yoga, The Sculpt Society, Technogym, or Open. Oura will feed data directly into those platforms, and even offer subscription discounts for members.
All of these updates are rolling out from today for free to all Oura users. Naturally, the newly released Ring 4 gets the update, but so do the older models.
