Now available to all Oura Ring Gen3 and Oura Ring 4 members, Symptom Radar helps identify early signs of strain in your body, empowering you to take proactive steps toward rest and recovery.
Developing Symptom Radar
The groundwork for Symptom Radar began back in 2020, when the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), launched the TemPredict study. Based on our initial algorithm, Oura introduced the Health Risk Management (HRM) platform for select enterprise clients, designed to support workforce safety.
For several years, Oura’s Science and Data Science teams continued work on improving the algorithm, ensuring it was more responsive, efficient, and accurate for alerting members to signs of strain on their body.
In April 2024, Symptom Radar was introduced in Oura Labs. When opted in, members could test the feature and provide direct feedback to developers. After listening to and iterating on member feedback, we launched the full Symptom Radar feature to Oura members in December 2024.
READ MORE: Inside the Ring: Developing Symptom Radar
How Symptom Radar Works
Symptom Radar looks for changes in your Oura data that may indicate something is straining your body. In addition to the 40+ biometrics that Oura tracks, Symptom Radar monitors specific metrics over time, such as skin temperature, average temperature trends, respiratory rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and inactive time, along with demographic information such as age.
A deviation in a combination of these metrics over time may indicate that you should focus on rest in the upcoming days, which improves your immune system responses and allows your body to recover from strain.
The Oura App displays signs of strain in a three-level estimate:
- No signs: There are no obvious signs in your biometrics of something straining your body
- Minor signs: There are small signs in your biometrics of something straining your body
- Major signs: There are stronger signs in your biometrics of something straining your body
To help you understand why you may be seeing minor or major signs of strain, Oura highlights biometrics from the previous night that show a significant deviation from your baseline. Because Symptom Radar monitors changes in your biometrics over time, it may detect subtle signs of strain, despite your biometrics being within their usual range.
If you choose, you can enable Rest Mode, which pauses your Activity Score, goal, and all activity contributors. This can help you focus on getting the restorative rest that your body needs to fight off illness and boost your immune system, rather than achieving a step count or caloric burn goal. Symptom Radar will continue to monitor your metrics even with Rest Mode activated.
Important notes:
- Your Readiness Score may not always correlate with Symptom Radar. Symptom Radar is designed to detect potential early signs of strain on your body, and may indicate signs of strain before they are reflected in your Readiness Score.
- Symptom Radar may not work optimally with pre-existing medical conditions. Pregnancy also impacts biometric baselines and may reduce the accuracy of Symptom Radar. Pregnant members can turn off the feature for the duration of their pregnancy.
- The Oura Ring is not a medical device and is not intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. Please do not make any changes to your medication, daily routines, nutrition, sleep schedule, or workouts without first consulting your doctor or another medical professional.
How to Use Symptom Radar
Symptom Radar is turned on by default for Oura members with an active Oura Membership. Among other inputs, the feature uses your sleep data (at least seven nights within the past 14 days) to check for signs of strain on your body. If there is a clear sign of strain, it will be spotlighted on the Today screen the following morning. In that case, you can tap on the Symptom Radar card to see more detail.
You can also access Symptom Radar at any time by selecting the menu in the upper-left of the Today screen and then selecting Symptom Radar.
Symptom Radar can be toggled on or off at any time from the detail screen.
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