Oura, maker of the most scientifically validated smart ring, Oura Ring, and the Centre for Sleep and Cognition (CSC) at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), today announced the opening of the Oura–NUS Joint Lab, a new research entity dedicated to advancing personalized preventive health.
Located at NUS, the Joint Lab will advance scientific research by combining continuous, real-world biometric data from Oura within approved research studies with NUS’s decades-long expertise in sleep science, physiological data analysis, and cognitive neuroscience to study how sleep and physical activity shape other areas of health and drive better health outcomes. The Joint Lab aims to generate insights that help individuals, clinicians, and health systems shift from reactive care to proactive, preventive health.
Building on a proven collaboration
Oura and NUS have collaborated for more than six years across multiple research projects, including evaluating the accuracy of Oura’s sleep tracking (1, 2, 3, 4), characterizing multi-country differences in nocturnal sleep variability (5), exploring effects of travel-related sleep disruption (6), and investigating how day-to-day shifts in wearable biometric data can inform about cardiovascular health and disease risk (7).
The new Joint lab will expand this work by designing and running multi-year studies that use Oura Ring continuous data to understand how real-world sleep and daily behaviors influence long-term health outcomes, both at the individual and population levels.
“Changing health habits is notoriously difficult, and doing it well requires robust science and accurate, continuous data,” said Dr. Shyamal Patel, Senior Vice President of Science at Oura. “Our long-standing collaboration with NUS has already shown how high-quality wearable data can deepen our understanding of cardiovascular, metabolic, and mental health. With this Joint Lab, we’re expanding that work to tackle some of the world’s most pressing preventive health challenges.”
Singapore as a hub for global preventive health
The Joint Lab is the first research entity in APAC for Oura, underscoring the company’s commitment to the region and recognition of Singapore as a strategic hub for international growth, health innovation, and public–private collaboration.
By anchoring this work in Singapore, the partners aim to contribute to national priorities around preventive health and healthy longevity and build data-driven models that can be scaled across APAC and global populations.
“The Joint Lab will accelerate the realization of our shared goal of reducing the burden of chronic disease,” said Professor Michael Chee, Director, Centre for Sleep and Cognition at NUS Medicine. “By pairing Oura’s continuous biometric data with our expertise in sleep science and behavior change, we can test new ways of giving people timely and relevant feedback that help them make optimal lifestyle choices every day for better health outcomes.”
“Oura’s decision to set up a joint lab in Singapore builds on the strong foundation of its long-standing collaboration with NUS. This is Oura’s first presence in Asia and reflects Singapore’s strong base of talent, research, and innovation capabilities, as well as the growing market opportunities in preventive health,» said Ms. Goh Wan Yee, Senior Vice President and Head, Healthcare, Singapore Economic Development Board.
References
(2) Improved sleep detection & classification with sleep tracker | NSS
(6) Insights about travel-related sleep disruption from 1.5 million nights of data