Oura Ring 4 Helps You Keep All Your Healthy New Year’s Resolutions

If your New Year’s resolution made it past the second Friday of January (and maybe into the Lunar New Year?), then congratulations are in order.

Colloquially known as "Quitter’s Day," the second Friday of January is when about 75% of New Year's resolutions are abandoned. If you made it through that weekend with a new fitness routine, better sleep habits, forgoing alcohol, eating better, or some other vow for a new, healthier you, then chances are you're going to stick with it for a bit longer.

But that doesn’t mean you couldn't use some help.

Oura has recently introduced Oura Ring 4 and it's proven to be their best ever, paired with an app that's been updated substantially over the past few months to make it easier than ever to get meaningful information from tracked biometric data.

But Will It Really Help Me Be Healthier?

For the past year, I’ve been keeping an eye on my health with Oura Ring 3 (and, more recently, Oura Ring 4) and it’s provided surprising insight into my health and habits, well beyond what can be told with a simple read of sensor data. Oura’s impressive app and sophisticated hardware help educate and motivate.

Physiological markers change before you see significant physical changes. It’s easy to get frustrated when, a month or more into a new workout routine you don’t see major changes in the mirror or on the scale. But, especially if you haven’t been training for a while, you’ll see the numbers start to shift in the app first. Oura is fantastic at helping you track unseen markers such as sleep quality and average resting heart rate.

When I wake up unexpectedly tired, I can check to see if something was amiss during the night. Did I wake up a lot? Did I have variations in my blood oxygen (a good indicator of snoring or sleep apnea)? Did I toss and turn?

More than that, I can add tags to my nightly results so that I can start to track patterns. Do I sleep better when I meditate before bed? Did that second cocktail get me to sleep quicker but disrupt my sleep patterns overall? Did I workout too close to bedtime? Once you start using the app to track habits in addition to data, the correlation between how your choices affect your health become much clearer.

And Oura isn’t just tracking at night. Throughout the day, it tracks your activities and biometric markers, like average heart rate. The most recent addition for all users, daytime stress analysis, is a great excuse to fire up the app and check in with how you’re handling the day. It's a better indicator of how you're actually feeling throughout the day as opposed to Apple's health rings on your Watch.

And if you happen to take a quick nap during the day, Oura tracks that too and celebrates when you’ve done it "right" so that it contributes to a reduction in your stress levels or warns you if it might interfere with your overall sleep.

There’s also a new symptom tracker that consolidates and analyzes your temperature, heart rate, and blood oxygen data, providing an early indicator of if you’re getting sick or how well you’re recovering from an illness. When I was sick with Covid last year, I was extremely grateful for the blood oxygen monitoring.

If you’re one of Oura’s many female users (Oura has a rapidly expanding number of female users) you'll get the benefit of cycle tracking, fertility window estimates, and pregnancy insights.

And that’s just the beginning, Oura Labs lets you try out next-gen features in the app like meal tracking and a virtual advisor/coach. Both features leverage AI to analyze images you take of your food or conversations you have with the in-app advisor to help you make healthier decisions. You can even tailor your Oura coach to be easygoing or more motivating.

Do I Really Need a New Ring For This?

I had my doubts when I unpacked the new Oura Ring 4. At first glance, it doesn’t appear to be all that different, especially if, like me, you're currently sporting the Horizon version of the Oura Ring 3.

But once I dug into the materials and design of Oura’s latest ring, I saw that there's much more than meets the eye. The most obvious change is the removal of the interior sensor bumps. These were necessary on the Ring 3 to ensure accurate readings. But the more powerful sensors of the Ring 4 eliminate the need for them.

That change enabled Oura to ditch its dual-material design in favor of an all-titanium ring. This is a major boon for anyone who has difficulties wearing rings with plastic or epoxy interiors. The single material construction also improved the accuracy of the Ring 4 sensors, eliminating gaps in overnight data by 30%. This is because the Ring 4 has 18 sensor paths to the Ring 3’s 8, allowing your ring to keep recording data even if it shifts on your finger during the night. Though, with new smaller and larger ring sizes available, Ring 4 should fit much better than previous generations.

Oura Ring 4 has better blood oxygen detection (with 120% better accuracy), giving you a summary of any breathing anomalies overnight—usually because you’re snoring but it can also help you identify more serious issues like sleep area.

The all-titanium construction allows Oura to make even more durable finishes as well. Where I had trouble with my original Ring 3’s Stealth finish just a few weeks after receiving it, the Ring 4's Black finish is chip-free after weeks of pointedly abusing it. The new structure of the ring allows for a bigger battery as well, giving you an estimated eight days of battery life to the Ring 3's five.

My takeaway is that, at just around $50 more than the Ring 3, the Oura Ring 4 is an impressive evolutionary leap forward for sensor rings that’s well-worth the cost. Starting at $349 for silver and black rings (matte and gold finishes cost more), you can get your Oura Ring 4 on the Oura website.