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Starting this week, the Oura ring’s app will be able to track what stage of pregnancy you’re in, and will finally adapt the messages you see about readiness and sleep to account for how your body changes in pregnancy. Oura has also introduced a tracker for perimenopause symptoms, based on a questionnaire used in menopause research.
How to use Oura’s new pregnancy tracking
In the Women’s Health section of the Settings tab, you can now turn on Cycle Insights (which has been there a while) or Pregnancy Insights. Turning on Pregnancy Insights will hide Cycle Insights.
When you turn the pregnancy feature on, you’re asked for either your due date or the date of your last period (which gestational age is based on). You can update your due date anytime from a settings icon on the pregnancy feature screen.
Turning this on adds a card to your home screen that tells you how far along you are (in weeks and days), with a countdown to the next trimester, and in the little icons at the top of the page, you get that current gestational age as well.
I tried this feature, adding a few fake due dates to see what kind of “insights” I get. They’re all pretty generic, but perhaps some people would find these helpful. In Week 11 you learn that “Some women see a gradual decrease in Readiness Score and HRV around this time.” In Week 17 you hear that heartburn and nasal congestion can be common. In Week 20 you learn that you may become more sensitive to caffeine. In week 34 the insight is that your sleep score may be decreasing and you should try “do your best to seek out moments of rest, no matter how small.”
More importantly, Oura says that scores will now take your stage of pregnancy into account. This has long been a gripe on Oura ring forums—healthy pregnant people will get dinged on their readiness and sleep scores because the app doesn’t take pregnancy into account. (Pregnancy affects your heart rate and HRV, among other things.) As one redditor put it: “The app knows I’m pregnant. Can we gets some pregnancy stats here or are we just going to keep saying pregnant women don’t recover, ever lol?”
That’s finally been addressed, although Oura doesn't say that they'll be changing how they calculate scores. Instead, they say the text that is presented with those scores will now reflect your stage of pregnancy. The app will also show your HRV, resting heart rate, and respiratory rate trends in a new set of graphs that are displayed "alongside a reference range derived from anonymized and aggregated Oura population data." Normally Oura just compares you to yourself; they seem to be trying here to give you some context as to what's normal during pregnancy. That said, I'm skeptical that this will be very helpful, since each person will still have their own unique data that doesn't necessarily match others. Pregnant people have enough to worry about without adding "my HRV is too high/low" to the list.
Oura also added new tags to track things that might occur during pregnancy. I chuckled when I read about the tags in Oura’s blog post about the new feature, since this reads like a perfect sample of what it feels like to be pregnant: “we’ve added 35 new tags to capture the full pregnancy experience, such as Braxton Hicks contractions, Contractions, High sexual desire, Heartburn, Constipation, and Vomiting.”
How to use Oura’s new menopause tracking
For menopause, nothing is changing in the metrics the ring records, or in the data it displays. But the app will now be able to walk you through the Menopause Rating Scale, a questionnaire used in menopause research. It asks about symptoms like hot flashes, sleep problems, vaginal dryness, and feelings of depression and exhaustion. You get a total score, as well as breakdowns into psychological, somatic (body), and urogenital scores.
Oura calls this feature the perimenopause check-in. The app keeps track of your scores over time, and can export a PDF of your results to share with a doctor—or, Oura hopes, one of the doctors at their “network of women’s health partners.” Those would be Midihealth, Evernow, Maven Clinic, and Progyny, all mentioned in the press release about Oura’s new features.
The tracking sounds potentially helpful, if an Oura user wanted to keep an eye on menopause symptoms. I have to feel a bit cynical about the way it feels like the main function of the feature is that you get advertised to. It may not read like an ad, exactly, but the feature is directing your focus toward problems you may or may not be having, and suggesting solutions that, coincidentally, will make somebody money.
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