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OURA Ring: Partnerships, Acquisitions, and the Future of Wearables

Author

Jared Dashevsky, MD
November 24, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

GRAND ROUNDS

OURA Ring: Partnerships, Acquisitions, and the Future of Wearables

One wearable tech company has been quietly but steadily stealing the spotlight: OURA. One week, they announce a high-profile partnership… the next, they’re making a strategic acquisition. It’s becoming clear—the wearable tech industry is gearing up for an arms race, battling to win over health-conscious consumers with smarter tracking and more seamless ecosystems.

In this article, I’ll dive into what makes the OURA ring stand out, break down their recent partnerships and acquisitions, and share why I believe “Guardian Angel Technology” is the future of wearable technology.

The Deets: OURA

OURA, founded in 2013, is a wearable tech company best known for their OURA Ring. This small ring device provides the following health features:

  • Sleep insights

  • Heart rate and HRV monitoring

  • Activity tracking

  • Illness monitoring

OURA compiles data together to output different composite scores from 0 to 100, giving you a big-picture view of your health status. This includes three types of health scores:

  1. Readiness Score

  2. Sleep Score

  3. Activity Score

OURA’s target market is health-conscious individuals who want to optimize their day-to-day performance. “Performance” doesn’t necessarily mean activity performance (e.g., running) but work performance as well (e.g., getting sufficient sleep). While OURA is mainly direct-to-consumer, they also partner with businesses for wellness programs. More on this next.

As of June 2024, OURA has sold 2.5 million rings. They expect to double their sales in 2024 to ~$500 million, overall making them a profitable business. Most recently, device maker Dexcom invested $75 million into OURA Ring at a $5 billion valuation (Series D). Yes, you read that right.

Notable Partnerships and Acquisitions

Over the past two years, OURA has made several strategic partnerships and acquisitions, as outlined below.

Partnerships

  • Talkspace (2023): Integrates sleep data from the OURA Ring into Talkspace’s platform, enabling users to share personalized sleep insights with their licensed therapists for more tailored mental health care and treatment planning.

  • Headspace (2023): Integrates guided mindfulness sessions, meditations, breathwork exercises, and sleepcasts into the OURA App, offering users personalized stress management tools and biofeedback to improve mental and physical well-being.

  • Clue (2023): Integrates temperature trend tracking into the Clue app, empowering women to better understand their health through evidence-based insights, with plans to expand into additional biometric data and collaborative research on topics like perimenopause.

  • Essence Healthcare, Medicare Advantage (2023): provides Medicare Advantage members with complimentary OURA Rings and app memberships, enabling seniors to integrate wearable health data like sleep, heart rate variability, and SpO2 into population health management systems, enhancing proactive, personalized health engagement and care.

  • Dexcom (2024): Integrates glucose data from Dexcom CGMs with OURA Ring metrics, creating a comprehensive metabolic health management experience while also receiving a $75 million strategic investment from Dexcom (as I wrote above).

Acquisitions

  • Proxy (2023): Proxy specializes in digital identity signal technology, which replaces physical keys, cards, and passwords with secure, biometrically-linked solutions stored on wearables. The acquisition allows OURA to expand into new areas such as payments, access, and security.

  • Sparta Science (2024): Sparta Science specializes in human performance data analytics. With the acquisition, Sparta Science integrated their Trinsic data platform (turns performance data into actionable intelligence) into the OURA Teams offering.

  • Veri (2024): Veri is a metabolic health company offering continuous glucose monitoring and insights. The acquisition will allow integration of Veri’s features, including meal timing insights, into the OURA App.

Dashevsky’s Dissection

You know how much I love wearables. I don’t wear the OURA Ring—I’m a WHOOP guy myself. Both devices ultimately aim to achieve the same goal in slightly different ways: OURA is a ring, while WHOOP is a band.

But I’m not here to compare the two. I’m here to talk big picture.

Wearable tech—whether it’s an Apple Watch, an OURA Ring, or WHOOP—has the potential to improve patient care. And it all ties back to what I call Guardian Angel Technology.

Guardian Angel Technologyrepresents the next generation of wearables. These devices go beyond tracking basic metrics like steps or heart rate. They integrate advanced machine learning and predictive analytics to monitor health proactively, predict potential issues, and deliver real-time feedback. The “guardian angel” aspect comes from the ability of these wearables to safeguard users as they go about their day—no need to constantly think about their health because the tech is silently watching over them.

OURA and WHOOP are uniquely positioned to lead in this space because their devices are designed for 24/7 wear. That’s a lot of data and analytics to work with. Compared to the Apple Watch—with its short battery life and less comfortable sleep tracking—these wearables have a major edge. Sleep, after all, is such a critical health metric.

Now, imagine OURA outputs a fall risk assessment based on gait data or a frailty score index, which is especially important for older adults. These reports can be shared with physicians who can make sense of the data and provide appropriate next steps. Or take it a step further: wearables could partner with digital health companies like Hinge Health (MSK telehealth). If the wearable detects gait instability, it could refer the user to Hinge Health for virtual physical therapy. That’s “guardian angel” in action—monitoring daily life, detecting a problem, enabling intervention, and likely preventing a fall that could have led to serious complications.

Whenever I talk about wearable tech, I always come back to Guardian Angel Technology. It’s so obviously the future of wearables. The potential to improve health, prevent harm, and transform care is limitless.

In summary, OURA Ring is not just a health tracker but a leader in the wearable tech space, leveraging strategic partnerships and acquisitions to integrate advanced health monitoring features. With its focus on 24/7 usability, OURA is poised to revolutionize patient care, prevent health risks, and empower users with actionable insights.

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This is an AI-generated podcast created solely on Healthcare Huddle content, vetted by me to ensure quality that’s on par with humans.

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