On October 25, 2022, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a new patent to the wearable sensor company, Oura Health. Oura takes a new approach to wearable health sensors with the Oura Ring, which incorporates medical grade sensors into a sleek ring design to gather biomedical data from a user. While the company has branched out to include activity monitoring, the Oura Ring started as a sleep tracking device. The Ring uses temperature, movement, heart rate, and HRV sensors to track the quality of a user’s sleep and determine a sleep score. Additionally, Oura features a unique readiness scoring algorithm which compares the quality of a user’s sleep with detected biological data, like temperature and heart rate, to generate an estimated score of how ready a user’s body is for activity.

While the newest generation of Oura Rings were announced last year, the Gen3 Horizon launched just a month ago and features a few upgrades from the previous Oura Ring technologies. The Gen3 Horizon has advanced calibration sensors for skin temperature detection and an additional IR sensor for data compensation when the ring is misaligned. The Gen3 Horizon also includes advanced sleep tracking technology, like an algorithm for sleep phase detection and blood oxygen sensors to monitor and detect breathing disturbances while the user is asleep. The improved sleep tracking methods of the Oura Ring Gen3 are protected in the company’s recently issued patent, US Patent 11,478,187.

The newest grant is the thirteenth domestic patent in the Oura Health portfolio, with four applications still pending. While the company is certainly ahead in the wearable ring sensor market, there is room to development the product marketing abilities of the Oura App. The acquisition of Consumer Sleep Solutions, LLC could expand the Oura Platform to include a marketplace for sleep solutions, such as connecting cooling bedding to users who are prone to overheating. They are both active within the same sectors, and the acquisition would strengthen Oura Health’s position in the Data Analysis sector.