Today we announced a recent filing with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) against Ultrahuman, RingConn, and Circular for infringement on multiple patents related to the Oura Ring form factor and Oura App.
We support and welcome innovation that moves the category forward. Unfortunately, when we see companies take shortcuts that imitate and ride the coattails of our innovation, we have no choice but to take action.
We’re clear on where we stand when it comes to patent infringement: we’ve spent over a decade investing countless hours of design, scientific research, and engineering into our hardware, software, and algorithms to create Oura Ring and the Oura Membership experience, and we’ll always protect those efforts.
Innovation is at the core of what we do at Oura. R&D is by far Oura’s biggest area of investment and our mission and vision is to continually deliver new science-validated features, improvements in our existing features, and the core R&D that is the foundation of new capabilities.
Over the last year, I’m proud of what we’ve been able to deliver to Oura members, and I am inspired by our team’s commitment to science-based innovation, accuracy, and user experience:
- We opened up an entirely new category in health tracking with the introduction of our Daytime Stress and Resilience features, allowing members to track physiological stress and understand their ability to withstand stress day-to-day. We’re already hearing incredible feedback from our community about how having a better understanding of their stress triggers and how they recover is making an impact on health outcomes.
- We continued to invest in our core area of sleep, with an upgraded sleep staging algorithm, a Chronotype and Body Clock feature, and new content from Headspace to help members sleep or destress, and we announced that we had tracked more than 2.3 billion hours of sleep as we celebrated Oura’s 10-year anniversary.
- Doubling down on women’s health, we debuted Cycle Insights, an upgraded feature formerly known as Period Prediction that shows Oura members which phase of the menstrual cycle they are in. More recently, we released Pregnancy Insights, a feature designed to empower mothers-to-be as they progress through each trimester.
- We upgraded our Automatic Activity Detection feature, delivering a dramatic increase in prediction accuracy, while we deepened our integration with Strava via Strava Stickers.
- We overhauled our Tags feature with custom tags, tag suggestions, and recurring tags to help members better track and understand the impact of their actions.
- We were the first smart ring to be covered and reimbursable with Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA), allowing US-based members to take full advantage of pre-tax dollars to purchase Oura Ring.
- Our many partners have continued to innovate on our platform for specific use cases: stress management with Apollo Neuro; metabolic health with Noom, Zero, and CGM players like Veri and January; and women’s health tracking with Flo, Glo, Clue, and Natural Cycles. The list of integrated partners is 600-strong and continues to grow.
- There are countless smaller features and fixes as well. In just the past 12 months, we’ve shipped over 25 new features and dozens of enhancements across iOS and Android, driving for the stability, accuracy, and user experience that Oura members expect.
We will never stop working to provide new capabilities and benefits to Oura members. That’s our commitment.
We have more exciting plans on our roadmap, and we can’t wait to share them with you over the weeks and months to come. Keep an eye out for our new platform for experimentation and innovation, as well as a major new capability that is unique across wearables. On behalf of everyone at Oura, we’re grateful for this community and we are dedicated to continuing to innovate to ensure you have the best tools to manage your health.
In good health,
Tom Hale, CEO, Oura Ring