Can the Latest Smart Ring Really Track It All?

I have never cared more about my sleep in my life than I have this month, since I’ve been wearing the Ora Ring 4 Ceramic. Before, if I woke up from sleep, I would blame last night’s bad choices and think, “Well, tomorrow night will be better!” Now, the first thing I do when I wake up is check my sleep score.

I’ve always been someone obsessed with tracking my body measurements, so when fitness trackers first came out I became addicted to both my heart rate and step count. But when sleep was added to devices, I largely ignored it. All that data started to add up and I felt like it was too much information. How can I walk 10,000 steps a day, get good sleep, and lower my heart rate, increase heart rate variability, and keep my cardiovascular age lower than my actual age? I’m really just one person.

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Most fitness trackers these days try to do it all and honestly, most of them fail at that task. But surprisingly, when I tested the Ring 4 Ceramic, I stopped feeling bothered by all the data points. Yes, the Ring 4 Ceramic crams every possible metric into its tiny device and associated app. And yet, somehow, it’s this way that I remain at least a little less upset than in the past.

I’ve also decided that out of all the options currently available for tracking my health – smartwatches, straps, etc. – a smart ring is far better.

The Ora Ring 4 Ceramic is going to cost you

The Ora Ring, which originally debuted exactly a decade ago after a successful Kickstarter campaign, is currently in its fourth iteration, which came out over the summer. In October, the company also launched its ceramic version of the Ora 4, which is made of high-performance zirconia ceramic, a material known for its durability and light weight. The new Ora Ring 4 Ceramic comes in four colors: Tide, Petal, Cloud, and Midnight.

According to Ora, one advantage of Ring 4 ceramic is that the colors are part of the ceramic, not an additional layer, as they were with previous metals. In older models, users had problems with the colors (a mixture of silver and gold) fading or chipping over time; There is no such problem in ceramic. And while I’m well into my second month, my Tide colored aura is still as vibrant as the first day.

View Ora Ring 4 Ceramic on Amazon

The Ora Ring 4 Ceramic currently costs $500, which is on the more expensive side for a health tracker. Regular Ring 4 is $350. Competing devices like the screenless Whoop 5.0 are an annual subscription that includes the band and start at $200, the Samsung Galaxy Ring is $400, and the most decked-out Fitbit Sense 2 starts at $250.

You also need a subscription to Ora Ring, which is $6 per month (you can also pay $70 upfront for the entire year). If you don’t want to pay that monthly fee, the smart ring still works and you’ll still get some data, including sleep analytics, an readiness score, and an activity tracker. But if you want access to everything else, you’ll have to pay that monthly fee.

The most comfortable ring I’ve ever worn?

I’m not usually a big ring wearer, but honestly I found the Ring 4 Ceramic to be snug and comfortable on my finger. I often wore it alternately on my middle or index finger. For the best and most accurate results, Ora recommends mostly the index finger because it provides a comfortable fit, and in general, the company suggests avoiding fingers where the knuckle is wider than the base. In my experience, I found that if I wear it on my middle finger, I can easily forget it was there, whereas if I wear it on my index finger, I get bothered by it.

Comfort is a big component of health and fitness trackers, and it isn’t discussed enough when reviewing these products. If the goal is to wear them 24/7, they should be comfortable, and it’s worth trying on a variety of smartwatches, straps, smart rings – to find which one suits you and your lifestyle.

According to the company, once charged it lasts for 8 days. In testing, my test ran for a full 7 days at times. It’s available in a variety of sizes – 4 to 15 – which is even larger than the previous iteration of the smart ring.

The Ring 4 Ceramic comes with what the company calls “Smart Sensing,” which is essentially an algorithm where the smart ring optimizes its multiple sensors to use the sensor with the best signal at any given time.

Is there anything it can’t track?

The better question, honestly, is what can’t the Smart Ring Track do? The Oura Ring 4 Ceramic uses infrared LEDs to measure blood oxygen during sleep. It also uses a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor, which detects changes in blood flow to measure heart rate and heart rate variability, as well as respiratory rate (which is important for sleep tracking). Temperature sensors measure average body temperature and accelerometer sensors track motion and activity.

All those sensors mean the Ring 4 Ceramic has the ability to track a huge amount of data, but the main thing is how it displays it all in a usable form.

The Ring 4 Ceramic provides a daily sleep score. It also breaks down sleep into smaller details, like total sleep versus time spent in bed and gives you a sleep efficiency percentage, which tells you how much of your time in bed you actually spent sleeping. It knows when you’re feeling wasted or wandering around with Sunday horrors. The Ring 4 Ceramic takes all this, along with your night’s resting heart rate, and calculates a sleep score. Anything 85 and above is optimal, and I’m proud to announce to the entire internet that my highest score was 88. This is where Health Optimization can become somewhat addictive, and I’m totally prone to it.

The tracker also offers a daily “readiness” score, calculated using an algorithm that takes into account your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, any significant body temperature fluctuations, as well as your respiratory rate and sleep. Again, anything 85 or higher is optimal, and I’m getting a lot of points in the 90s, which honestly makes me proud of my mind, body, and spirit.

It also provides a daily activity goal that you can set yourself, and it’s good to achieve that goal each day. Although the daily activity target is fairly standard for all trackers, Ora’s is really well presented.

Similar to its competitor Whoop, Ring 4 also offers daily stress analysis. It tells you how long your body was under high stress (which it detects based on changes in your heart rate, heart rate variability, and your body temperature). It also shares a daily stress score by telling you whether you were “stressed”, “busy” or “relaxed” that day.

It didn’t predict that I was going to be sick, but it could tell that I was going to be sick.

Luckily for all of you, I tested the Ora Ring 4 Ceramic during the months of October and November, which is peak cold weather. The smart ring has an algorithm built into it called symptom radar, which essentially uses changes in skin temperature, respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability to detect if something is wrong with your system. Theoretically, the idea is that it could detect these changes early and predict when you’re getting sick. You can then take it easy on those days or maybe sleep an extra hour or two that night.

I came down with a cold in mid-October, which honestly started out of the blue. I look after a friend’s baby on Monday. She sneezed in my face several times (so cute) and then Thursday morning, I woke up with that dreaded itchy lump in my throat that got worse and then better over the course of the next week and a half. The Ring 4 Ceramic detected no change from my baseline when I woke up on Tuesday or Wednesday or even Thursday. But once my cold went into full swing, the app noted that both my body temperature and resting heart rate were elevated, and wanted to know what was going on.

That cold was pretty mild, and came on quickly, so I wonder if I would have had a serious illness like the flu or COVID, if it had been detected a little earlier. I also wonder if I keep wearing the Ring 4 Ceramic for a longer period of time, will I get better at knowing what is normal for me and what is not?

period tracking

I still think the best period tracker is a pen and paper (or a dedicated note in your Notes app). Oura’s new Cycle Insights and Fertility feature, which the company unveiled in late October (I’ve been using it since the beginning of my testing in early October), requires 60 nights of data to make accurate predictions. I would like to give the Ring 4 Ceramic a few more months after this to really assess whether it is working well or not. So, it’s too early to tell how well it works.

To predict your menstruation, the tracker collects body temperature readings over a long period of time (two months or more) and uses this in addition to an algorithm to predict when your next cycle might come and when you might ovulate.

How useful is the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic really?

The Aura 4 Ceramic can really do it all, from tracking your sleep and your stress score to monitoring your period, your activity level, and your heart rate. There are also a number of integrations you can use with the Ring 4, including Headspace, Strava, Natural Cycles, and even Stello, which is a continuous glucose monitor. Connecting it to a smart ring allows users to view their glucose levels in the Ora app, which shows how factors like food choices, sleep, and activity affect their glucose levels. Oura’s latest partnership, signed in late October, is with blood testing company Quest Diagnostics. For an additional annual subscription fee of $100, users can obtain a comprehensive blood panel, although it is not available in every state.

However, as I’ve written in the past when reviewing similar products like Whoop and Polar Loop, how much of this data is useful?

After a month of use, I became obsessed with my sleep score, but I’m not sure if I’ve actually become a better sleeper because of it. This is equally true for tracking my activity and my strain score. I’ve been a health tracking user for years, and I’ve found that the main question you have to ask yourself when deciding whether you want to spend a few hundred dollars or more on these devices is: What are you trying to get from these devices? Is it better sleep, less stress, increased energy and activity? These devices can do all of this to some extent, and perhaps Oura can do it best, but it still depends on how much work you are personally willing to do to improve your health.

View Ora Ring 4 Ceramic on Amazon