Oura Ring users will know that the secret sauce that is part of the wearable’s success includes a series of features in what’s called Oura Labs—a hub of innovations that’s available to subscribers. One of the best of these is Symptom Radar, which helps you know when you may be coming down with something.
Oura Ring and Symptom Radar.
Now—rolling out for all Oura Ring Gen3 and Oura Ring 4 users by Monday, Dec. 9—that highly useful feature has been upgraded and is being folded into the main Oura Ring app.
The Oura Ring looks at a series of key metrics, such as resting heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing rate and trends in temperature and assesses whether the results are aligned with your personal baseline or not. From here it can tell if you have no signs of cold or flu-like symptoms, minor signs or major signs.
Then, each morning, it feeds back the results in the app. If there are no signs, it tells you so. If there are minor or major signs, along with the notification, it advises you to turn on Rest Mode and take steps towards recovery.
Symptom Radar on Oura Ring app.
All very well, but does it work? I’ve had notifications in the past, when the feature was part of Oura Labs, which has warned me I have minor signs. I have routinely felt fine, and sometimes been skeptical. The Ring was always right, it turned out a few days later. In other words, it worked brilliantly.
The new version is said to have increased accuracy as well as more detail compared to the older set-up, and includes a history graph. The increased accuracy is based on a newly developed algorithm based on a huge data set. This monitoring initiative has been going since 2020 when it could spot symptoms with 76% accuracy. That’s been significantly increased.
It’s worth noting that the Ring spots respiratory symptoms, so it treats colds, flu and even Covid (which you’ll remember was constantly described as having flu-like symptoms) the same.
This is a hugely useful feature and it’s right that it’s now getting a wider audience among Oura Ring users.