Insights to act on. A conversation with Oura’s Jason Russell, on the future of wearable technology.
What do you do to stay healthy? You exercise, you meditate, you sleep. I do all those things, but I like to track them. And how about this? I can do it in this tiny little device, the Oura Ring. How does it pack so much tech into such a small package? Today we're gonna find out. We're chatting with Jason Russell, VP of Consumer Software Product. Let's go.
All right, well thanks so much for being here. We appreciate having you. We always like to start off the show with who you are and what you do, so I'll let you kick things off. Awesome. Yeah, so I'm Jason Russell. I'm the VP of Product for Consumer Software at Oura.
So I drive the vision and strategy and software roadmap for the company. Now, Oura as a company, I think a lot of people know about wearables. they know about tracking their stats and all this kind of thing, and a lot of people know about Oura. I will say, as I was wearing mine around, I had a previous generation, we'll talk a little bit about some of the differences in a little bit, which by the way, huge fan of this fourth gen, but I wanna back it up a little bit and talk about just the entire market in general. Like 15 years ago or so, there was no real wearable category and now there are so many different things.
So talk to me a little bit about where you guys saw, you know, the beginning of Oura, like let's get into this and then why, 'cause it's such a huge product category. Yeah, absolutely. So we really pioneered the smart ring category 10 years ago. Wearables, at the time, I think you could say wearable 1.0
really focused on step counting and then activity kind of being the main focus, and we saw an opportunity to focus on holistic health and the ring form factor really unlocked that for us. So what that meant in practice, you know, you're wearing the ring 24/7, so it's holding a charge for up to a week, which means you're sleeping with it, and sleep was a huge initial focus for us. So, sleep we see as the foundation of health, and we knew that because you're wearing the ring 24/7, we could really serve that uniquely. And it's the best place on your body actually to take a pulse and get this data, so we could do it in the most accurate way as well. And so we really started there and have made the focus on holistic health. All right.
So I'm always curious about this, because I look around and there's billions of dollars invested in healthcare, there are apparel companies everywhere, there's gadgets everywhere, but I'm not sure we're healthier. So what is your take from a wearable company? What's your take on this? Yeah, we're really empowering you to take control of your health, is how we see it, and just making your health visible to you in ways that weren't before. We like to say that we're giving you a sixth sense.
You know, you're getting visibility into these systems in your body that have been invisible to you in the past, like sleep, right? We spend eight hours of every day asleep. That's like a third of our life that's just been invisible to us. (chuckles) So kind of to me it feels like putting on night vision goggles, where suddenly I can see into that time that I would've been asleep otherwise, and it's empowering you to make better decisions.
You know, you can think of this as like a way to find your formula for sustained wellbeing. And the reality is there's a not a lack of information about health out there in the world. There's actually probably too much, right? Right, right, right. Just have to have a social media account to be an expert on health. And so, you know, we hear members talk about how they can feel like a weather vane just twisting in the wind about what is the actual right thing for me to do to be healthy. Oh, totally.
So Oura really is an antidote to that, because you get ground truth, you can actually see how your body's responding to the choices you're taking every day. Well, I think in a lot of ways, something I really appreciate about it is you're kind of able to quantify what maybe you kind of know, but you don't know how to measure it, right? Like sometimes you wake up and you're groggy. You know you're groggy, but you don't know why you're groggy and you don't really know your level of grogginess. Like, is this groggy that's just gonna be okay all day, or is this groggy like you need to push that really important meeting until tomorrow because you're gonna be terrible in an interview, you know? And I like that you guys have found a way to quantify that with your Sleep Score, with your Readiness Score. I got an extra hour of sleep, I'm at 93 today, so I felt like I'd be good for this. That's pretty good. Congrats!
That's the best all week. And then also a big shout-out to my four-year-old who slept through the whole night. So that's a big shout-out to him for helping me through that. Amazing, amazing. Yes. We've all been through it as parents, I'm one myself.
Yeah, great time of life to put extra focus on getting the most out of the sleep you can get, which we're great for. But we hear that all the time, where the data, again, we put a huge emphasis on accuracy, and I think you really see that because it does correspond so well with how you feel, and it's validating. You know, I think we have a feature in what we call Oura Labs, that's our member innovation hub where we're trying out new things together with our members, and something we're looking at is called Symptom Radar, which actually spots evidence of strain, you know, something that might suggest illness on the horizon. And when you see that while you're feeling fine, but then a day or two later, "Oh, yep, there I am, I got sick," it really helps you feel like, "Okay, those feelings of sickness that I was starting to experience, I have the data to support it," and it really just gives me that validation.
The Stress feature we launched this year as well. You know, I had this moment that felt really hard for me and now I open the app and I can see, yeah, your data says your body was under strain during that time. It just helps you get more in tune with your body. And how would you compare, and I know you're talking about the emphasis of sleep, which I don't really see that with other wearables, with watches and bracelets and, you know, even some wearables are like in earrings and things like that.
How do you guys compare in that space? Like, what really sets you guys apart? Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, accuracy. You know, we actually don't compare ourselves to competitors when it comes to accuracy. We compare ourselves to the medical gold standard. So in the case of sleep, that would be the polysomnograph, and we're actually in 80% agreement with PSG for sleep staging. So we're just continually raising the bar when it comes to accuracy.
Again, you go to the doctor, they take your pulse on your finger for a reason, so we're right up against the optimal place to get this signal, where, you know, a wrist-worn device, you're shining the light from the top of your wrist down to the veins underneath. There's just a lot of distance to cover in order to achieve that accuracy. So that's one huge part for us. So accuracy's huge.
I would also argue convenience. You know, if you're someone like myself who likes to wear a watch, like a regular watch, then all of a sudden I don't have to choose. Yep, see? Yeah, we can throw our watches up, yep.
There it is, yeah. (chuckles) Regular analog, tick, tick, tick. Then you don't have to choose. I've seen some people have to double wrist because they're like, "I want my health tracker or my health thing on one wrist and a watch on the other." I mean, that's commitment to your health and I appreciate that, but I would argue at the disservice to your own style. So I like the kind of elegance of it.
And then especially, and we can kind of move into this fourth gen, I feel like it's more elegant, sleeker. I don't know if it's lighter. It's hard to measure, but it definitely feels that way, and there's so many other components. So talk to me about, this is a gen 3, and there's some big differences here. Actually I'll also hold up a gen 4.
I know you guys have better B-roll than this, but just for the viewers at home. Some of the big differences here, the shape, obviously, and then the sensors that are raised on the previous gen and they're flush here. So talk a little bit about how you guys innovated, and what are you loving about this new generation? Absolutely, yeah.
And you alluded to, you know, the wrist-worn device. It's not necessarily as comfortable to wear while you're sleeping, and it's often charging overnight as well, and so we think a lot about- That's a really good point. Yeah, the battery life on this is great. That's a good point. Exactly. So we're always thinking about that continuous wear. You know, this thing is with you 24/7, it has to be comfortable, it has to just blend seamlessly into your life.
You have to not notice it so you can actually sleep, of course, as well. So we just have always been looking to raise the bar on continuous wear, and really the big themes for gen 4 are a big improvement in comfort, raising the bar even higher, and accuracy as well, and then bringing that to more people by expanding our size range. And on the comfort front, you showed it, the domes are kind of the first thing you'll notice, where we had those three domes and those were an intentional design choice for us five years ago when we introduced those domes. That was in service of accuracy. They create this light channel that helps us get the signal we need to process your data, but it does come at the expense of comfort.
And so as other smart rings have entered the market, you'll see some of them do away with those domes, and they're doing that in the favor of comfort. But they lose accuracy, is what you're saying? Exactly, it's a trade-off, and not one that we're comfortable making, right? We're not gonna ever sacrifice on accuracy. So what's really amazing about gen 4 is we've been able to do away with those domes. You get this all-titanium interior now, it feels smooth against your skin, but we've actually been able to make a big leap forward in accuracy simultaneous to that. The way we're doing that is with Smart Sensing. I'd love to tell you a bit about that technology.
I'd love to hear. Smart Sensing sounds like two things I love, smart and sensing. We're doing both simultaneously.
Great. So yeah, so Smart Sensing is our all-new platform this ring is built on top of, and it's done a few ways. One is that all-titanium interior.
So that's helping with comfort, but it's also helping with accuracy, because titanium is a material that channels light more precisely. And then we've actually greatly expanded the signal pathways. So those domes in gen 3 can form eight of what we call signal pathways. Basically an LED and a photodetector form a signal pathway. With this guy we get 18 signal pathways.
So we've more than doubled the amount of data available to us. But then most magically, we're actually running an algorithm on top of that to continuously optimize to find the best signal pathway for you right now. Why is that important? Well, rings rotate, right? We don't design our ring to work under optimal conditions and say, "Here are the 10 rules you have to follow to have our ring work." Totally, totally. That's not life. And you don't want a gap because you grabbed a bag and it twisted your ring and then it's like, "Oh, you weren't alive for 45 minutes today," and now my stats are off and that was the whole point anyway.
You got it. Data gaps are something we were big-time trying to solve for here, and that's important because data is really telling a story and that can feel like a missing paragraph in the story. You wanna know what was happening in that moment when you have a gap in your data. So we're solving for that as well as just the unique aspect of human physiology.
You know, we have different anatomy, different skin tone, different body mass index. Our veins and arteries are actually not all in the same place. And so all that individual variation also can influence signal quality. So by pioneering this new technology, Smart Sensing, we're now actually able to optimize to find the best signal pathway, inclusive of, again, when that ring is rotating and it's really uniquely suited to you and your unique finger as well. So it sounds kind of almost like a hallway of doors and the sensors are knocking on, like, what's the best door at this moment. Like, "Oh, the data's coming in from this one, great."
And then it, "Oh, no, not anymore. It's a little bit here. Oh, there's a lot of great data here, let's use that." So it's almost able to kind of, like, overlap itself to make sure it's getting all the data at the right time in the best manner. That's a great way to describe it. I'm gonna start using that.
And then what's cool is- There you go. you know, we tell the team, "Hey, make it make it way more accurate, but also can you make sure that the battery life is is unaffected?" (chuckles) Big challenge. They love hearing that, right? So make it better, make it last longer, make it lighter. Great. Yeah.
But those usually are at odds. That's right. More sensors but more battery but lighter.
What? Exactly, yeah. But indeed, we were able to get another day of battery life out of this approach, and the reason is we're not actually using all those signal pathways at once. So we're now making more efficient use of the ring's resources than, for example, if we were firing all signal pathways at once, you're draining more battery. So this technology, big leap in accuracy, but simultaneously improving in battery life as well. I love that. And what about the app, because that's something that's critical to the use of this.
This is just what's feeding the information. It's really impressive what you can glean from the app. So tell me why you guys kind of went app-heavy on this.
Not to take anything away from the hardware, but the software is really impressive. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, to kind of zoom out, we've been on this journey where we talked a lot about sleep, but we've expanded quite a bit since then. We really call ourselves a personal health companion, and we've introduced heart health, women's health, stress, and resilience. We have really, well, we say six pillars of health when you take readiness, sleep activity, heart health, women's health, stress.
And so we've just packed a lot in. We've actually launched 24 new features in the last 18 months alone, and with Oura Ring 4 also introduced some new software features on top. So, I wanna tell you about those software features, but also an app redesign that came along with it that just kind of reflected, hey, we've packed a lot of value in here and it's also starting to become like, how do I find that thing I was looking for as well.
Right, right, 'cause there's so much in there now. There's so much in there now. Exactly, yeah. But a few things to highlight.
You know, we launched Automatic Activity Detection with heart rate simultaneous to the Ring 4 launch. You don't have to manually start anything, and we're actually gonna do that for the 40+ activity types that we automatically detect. If you've been using our product- Wow, that's super helpful.
Yeah, it'll actually ask me. It'll be like, "Hey, we detected an activity, we think it's your walk. We think you went for a walk based on, you know, your heart rate and all this and the length of time. Is that right?" And then you can go in and adjust it and be like, "No actually, I was playing basketball but I'm terrible and so, you know, my heart rate wasn't very good," you know, or whatever.
But I love that it's automatic, because I had at that gen 3, all right, I'm gonna go for a run. It's one more thing I need to do to track, and it just became, you know, I had to be so conscious about that going into it. So I love that I'm just walking around and boom, it says, "Ah, you were probably walking," or go to the gym and do some cardio and it just knows, "Oh, you were probably doing this, is that right?" "Yes." Exactly, yeah. I mean, it's hard enough to make time and space for exercise in our daily life. Any friction you can pull out, just get out the door. That's a good way to say it.
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, and we like to say all movement counts. That's a really unique part of this, is those what we call Automatic Activity Detection moments, you're getting those walks, you're getting those trips to the gym, but you're also getting yard work or dancing, you know? Chasing your kids around, right? Chasing your kids around.
Like, we exert ourselves in so many different ways in our daily lives, and Oura really wants to reward and celebrate that and recognize that. And we hear from our members all the time how validated and seen they feel when they go, "Yeah, carrying those groceries up those 10 flights of stairs, like, my heart rate was going." It counts. Exactly. There is something, not even in the gamification of it, but just in the, like, it wasn't lost, right? It wasn't for nothing. Like, "I climbed the 10 flights, I don't know if I wanna do it. Wait, I've got Automatic Activity, I can't wait to see how I perform as I climb these 10 flights of stairs."
That's a really good point. I like that kind of mindfulness of it. Exactly, yeah. And so now you're getting that heart rate data for all that activity and now you can start to see, am I spending enough time in those kind of low-intensity zones and the high-intensity zones and really get a overall picture of your fitness and how you're contributing to it from that tracking.
So that's one big new feature for us. We've also launched fertility. We have now what we call Fertile Window. I saw this.
I saw this on the website. I thought this was super fascinating as well. So what data is allowing that type of prediction? Like what are you gleaning from from just the ring? Yeah, so, you know, of course we have research-grade temperature sensors in the ring and that's a critical part of measuring the menstrual cycle, and Oura's been investing a ton here. We actually have now slightly majority female member base where previously majority male. Reflecting our investments here, 20 to 30-year-old females are our fastest growing user segment.
And we've been on this road now for a couple years. We launched period prediction back with gen 3 and layered into that now Cycle Insights. So explaining the different cycle phases you may be in. And we can do all of that with temperature data plus a combination of other biometrics, and now we are doing so for those trying to conceive.
So you can actually see the window of time during which you'd be fertile. You can see when we predict ovulation day, we'll actually detect ovulation day when it does occur as well, tell you chance of conception, high, medium, low. So all of this really takes the headaches out of trying to conceive.
There's a lot of guesswork involved otherwise, and this is just bringing more confidence and hopefully helping you succeed faster as well. And also, I'd never knew this, I've done some reading, but I didn't know this, but I love that you guys are utilizing kind of the peer, user, creator insights as it were for input and insight and suggestions into how the product should evolve. So it's really cool that you guys are kind of beta testing some of these with users directly and not just relying on, you know, a room full of basically the same person who's a scientist who says, "We don't need that feature and we do need this feature," and it turns out that's not what people want. So that's really cool.
How did that evolve? Yeah, absolutely. So Oura Labs we launched earlier this year, and as I said, that's our member innovation hub, and exactly, that's where we're trying out new stuff with our members. And, you know, people love that opportunity to try things in their early infancy and it's hugely helpful for us as well. We have this direct channel to have these conversations with our members, shape those experiences and get them ready for prime time. Symptom Radar I mentioned is one of those features.
A really popular one is Oura Advisor. This is our LLM product. So we've been, you know, AI's been a big part of the product now really for a long time when we just talk about predictive technology. You know, we're finding patterns in data and our sleep staging algorithm, our blood oxygen sensing, all this is leveraging AI.
But LLMs are the, you know, form of AI we're all talking about the most these days, for good reason, and LLMs are enabling now a conversation on your health that is unlike anything that's been possible before. And that's large language model, right? LLM? Large language model. Exactly, yeah. So generative AI.
What it is is just a conversation. You can engage in a conversation with our LLM, basically, that, you know, can ask direct questions of, "Hey, I woke up feeling groggy, but I don't quite understand why. Any clues?" And it can go look into your data and help you understand what choices you might have made yesterday that could have influenced that, give you guidance. But is it judgy? Is it gonna say, "Listen, Jason, I told you, you needed to get more sleep and you're staying up and you're bingeing some shows and you need to change that," or is it a little more approachable? You know, what's unique about it is that you can actually choose.
So we have a tone setting, and you don't typically see this, but you can say, "Hey, I like that kind of empathetic tone." "It's okay to take the rest day." Oh my gosh, that's hilarious! Or you could say, "Hey, get me off the couch." Full-on coach, yeah. Exactly, push me. You know, we've taken a really differentiated approach to this and it's really not just AI that's making it possible.
It's taking what's great about Oura and putting it together with AI that's enabling this. You know, we have been in this game for 10 years. We understand health backwards and forwards. We've got 20+ PhDs working in, you know, every domain imaginable for health. And we have a unique perspective on health that we're now combining with AI to make these conversations possible, where if you just started from AI alone would be challenging. So on our show we love to go behind the scenes.
We love to get the stories behind these products, and I think something that I've grown in my appreciation is what it takes to bring a product to market. You know, a lot of times you walk into a Best Buy or a store and you see a product and you think, "Oh, cool, there's a product in a box, okay." But the millions of hours, I don't know, depending on how many generations in you are, the thousands of people, the millions of emails for sure that it takes and the back and the forth and everything. And it's so interesting to have all of that lead into this, right? Yep! And you just think, whoa! So we always wanna find, what are some of the stories that that brought us to this place? So I was curious if you had any.
As you said, we've got engineering, science, hardware, firmware, you know, we're dealing with the human body. There's a lot of variables here, and we don't put products in the market that we don't stand behind and truly believe in, so we put a lot into that validation as well. And it's kind of like getting all the food hot to the table at the same time during Thanksgiving.
There's a lot of conducting going on. It's impossible. That's an impossible task. Exactly, yeah.
So then just, you know, throw a global pandemic into the mix to add a little more complexity, and of course, you know, that was kind of a unique moment in time. That's why you guys started measuring stress, 'cause everyone was so stressed. You're like, "You know what? We should actually measure this, guys." "Here's an idea." Exactly, yeah.
But you know, we've grown a lot as a company. I mean, you see the growth externally, you know, 2 1/2 million rings sold, we more than doubled our member base in the last year alone, but we've grown up a lot as a company as well in terms of our operations and scalability to how we do things. You know, I had of course a little bit of that stress graph changed as we led up to the Oura Ring 4 launch, but it was really a smooth launch for us and shows how much we've grown. And I think, you know, we talked earlier about what really sets you guys apart.
I think the multiple verticals that you guys offer within the ring really sets you apart, because for the most part, other fitness trackers are basically for heart rate, calorie burn, you know, steps, right? And that's a great thing to be measuring, but what I'm hearing you say is someone may buy the ring, not because they go to the gym or are trying to compete in a half marathon, but because they wanna track their sleep. Or they're like, "Man, I don't know, I've just been feeling a lot more stress recently. I wanna try to understand that a little bit more." It may not even have an athletic application to it, and I think that's really fascinating, because I never really considered the ring in that way. Yeah, totally. You know, we spent a lot of time thinking about the why behind movement.
You know, you don't just have a step count to meet and check a box. It's really like, what are you trying to achieve to be healthy? And a great example of that, another feature we launched now back in April, it's called Cardiovascular Age. It's actually helping you understand the health of your heart and essentially the age of your heart relative to your own age. So, to give a bit more detail, so what we're measuring is called pulse wave velocity.
That's literally the speed with which the blood is coursing through your veins. And that's a measure of arterial stiffness. So stiffer arteries, you're gonna have faster pulse wave velocity. Stiffer arteries are older arteries, right? So, we know roughly how stiff your arteries ought to be based on your current age. And we can tell you, "Hey, you're in line or ahead of schedule, you know, your arteries are even healthier than they ought to be for your age." Or, "Hey, this is something to pay attention to."
And that gives this sort of longevity angle on why to move every day. You know, you're not just trying to meet a calorie goal, achieve some aesthetic or superficial or short-term thing. This is about, you're chasing the kids in the yard, what about your grandkids? Are you gonna keep up with those kids, those guys as well? Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, moving every day you can start to see, you know, I happen to have a cardiovascular age I'm happy with, but that wasn't always the case.
And I added a few more runs per week for six weeks and now I suddenly see that number improving. That for me is really motivating for where I am in my health journey, you know, across the 40-year mark and now conscientious of, hey, these investments I make today are gonna add up to benefits long term. You know, I really love that, because I think so many people go to the doctor and they hear you have high blood pressure or low blood pressure or high cholesterol, low cholesterol. In that instance, there's no like, okay, you know, just eat less bacon.
There's not a whole lot else I could do. But you can actually measure basically the elasticity of the blood vessels through this information, and that can, like you said, you were able to quantify that, therefore you could measure it over a six-week period and say, "Oh good, I'm actually making progress here." Not just like, "The next time I get a burger, I'm not gonna order bacon." Like, it's almost impossible to really see any growth from that. So what a cool aspect I'd never considered either. That's so fascinating.
You got it, yeah. And I mean, when we talk about healthcare, I think, you know, the unfortunate reality is a lot of those conversations are you have heart disease or, you know, you've now got a problem that that is not easily corrected. You gotta take medication, you gotta take pills, you gotta do all these things for it. Exactly.
And what we're really going after here is more proactive health, right? Giving you these tools to spot, hey, this is an early warning sign that you might wanna take action now so that you don't face, you know, chronic heart disease, that sort of thing. Number one killer in America, cardiovascular disease. And when you have cardiovascular disease, it's often the wrong moment to start focusing on it, right? We wanna get way ahead of that. Those moments when you're going to your GP once a year, you get a half hour with them to dig into your health, it's just hard to fully take control of your health in that moment, where you have these tools in your hands from Oura now, you're really able to do a lot to proactively influence your health outcomes.
And what's next for Oura? Obviously you guys have done a lot to grow, and I don't like asking people this question 'cause I know they're just like, "I just launched the fourth gen! What do you mean what's next? I wanna catch a breath! I wanna take a vacation with my family! What do you mean what's next?" But in terms of the brand, where are you guys going next? Are you going to be diversifying your product? Are you going deeper in software? What are we looking at? Yeah. We have a phrase at Oura called a five-second victory lap. (chuckles) We like to celebrate- Way to go and get back to it. And lets go. Exactly, yeah. No, we wanna keep the pace of innovation going, and when we launch a new ring, we think of it as a platform on which we can continue to innovate.
And you saw that with gen 3 where we launched the new hardware, we launched these features with it and some that followed, and then we just kept going, Cardiovascular Age, Stress, Cycle Insights. We're able to deliver a lot against those capabilities, and now we have this next-generation platform to build on top of as well. So a lot more innovation to come. You know, women's health continues to be a big area of focus for us where there just is so much untapped opportunity. We really see it as an underserved area in technology in general and where we've been investing heavily to really address that. So, you know, we're serving the reproductive journey in new ways.
We launched Fertile Window, there's more to do on that front. You know, menopause obviously is a big area of interest for us and one where we have just published a report with a lot of incredible data. We can see in our own data what's actually happening in a woman's body in those menopausal years and how that differs from pre-menopausal years. So lots of innovation to come there. You know, you've seen some of our activity in bringing in some new companies and capabilities as well with Sparta Science, with Veri, our acquisition of a metabolic health company, obviously signaling our interest in metabolic health as well.
And yeah, jump into Oura Labs to get a little bit of a preview, right? You can now do things like meal logging in a very Oura way, where you take a picture and boom, you got every ingredient on the plate using computer vision. We're gonna leverage that kind of data to help you understand how what you're eating day to day is impacting your health. Does it work for donuts? Does it just sugar and then cream and then that's pretty much- Yeah, yeah. Okay.
That's the only place where we do judge, we say, "Come on Bradley, man, another donut?" (chuckles) If I could hack it so the computer thinks donut equals broccoli, I might be really crushing it out there. There you go, there you go. You can just hold a broccoli over the donut for the picture- I like it. A picture of a broccoli. I don't even have broccoli here.
I'd have to print a picture. I don't have broccoli. Nice. Awesome.
Well, Jason, thank you so much for taking the time. Way to go with Oura. Lot of cool stuff. Love the software applications and the focus on, you know, kind of what's next for you guys is exciting as well.
So, thanks for taking the time. Thank you for the time, Bradley. Really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for watching and/or listening. Make sure you subscribe and let us know in the comments which product you'd like to see next. (energetic music)
2024-11-29 07:58
