The Oura Ring wasn’t the first smart ring, but it’s certainly the one that has showcased best how to bring fitness and health monitoring features to our fingers.
It’s now no longer the only smart ring that can do that though with the emergence of rivals like the Samsung Galaxy Ring. There’s no doubt Oura will or already has made moves to stave off the new competition.
So, has there been any chatter about a new Oura that could be known as the Oura Ring 4? Will it launch soon? Here’s what we think we know about Oura’s next smart ring so far.
When will the Oura Ring Gen 4 be released?
Oura hasn’t revealed that a new smart ring is coming, though as we’ll get into later, there is some evidence to suggest it’s in the works.
The current version, the Oura Ring Gen 3, launched back in October 2021 and since then, Oura has focused on offering its sensors and smarts in new designs as well as adding more features to its companion app to boost the capabilities of its smart ring.
The Oura Ring Gen 2 launched in 2018, shipping globally in April of that year, so we’ve seen launches both earlier and later in the year. The gap between launches is roughly the same, so it feels like we could be due a new ring, but given how much work Oura has done to improve the functionality of Gen 3 in recent months, it’s not a given that one is imminently on the horizon.
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How much will the Oura Ring Gen 4 cost?
Like the launch date of a new Oura Ring, we don’t have any sort of steer on how much it will cost when or if it lands.
We can look at how much the Oura Ring currently costs and whether Oura might decide to react to the arrival of cheaper smart rings from the likes of Ultrahuman, Ringconn and Circular.
The latest Oura Ring pricing starts at £299/$299 for the Heritage model and jumps up to £349/$399 for the fully round Horizon design. If you opt for the Stealth finish or Gold that sees the price go up to the £549/$599 mark.
While it’s not the cheapest smart ring available, it is still cheaper to buy than the Samsung Galaxy Ring (£399/$399), though unlike Samsung’s ring, you do have to pay for the added subscription to get the best out of it.
It seems unlikely Oura will ditch that subscription model and will likely be a case of paying for both hardware and software for the next one though we are happy to be wrong.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
What specs and features will the Oura Ring 4 have?
Design
One of the biggest reasons Oura has stood above all other smart rings is that it simply looks like a nice ring to wear. You’ve got two designs and a range of different finishes.
I’d wger that when the new Oura drops, it’ll be more of the same.
Especially based on the first piece of evidence of its existence that’s surfaced and spied by Android Authority through a certification listing, which might have given us our first glimpse at Oura’s new ring.
The series of images that have been assigned the model number OA11 show off a ring that has a close resemblance to Oura’s Horizon ring, with sensors that seem to sit more flush with the inner casing than previous versions.
As well as noting an additional OA12 model number, which could well relate to the Heritage version of the smart ring, the listing also mentions the name Oura Ring 4 along with a potential colour option with gold included on a product label.
In terms of ring sizes, the documents suggest the ring pictured is being tested across 7, 9, 13 and 15 ring sizes. The Oura Ring Gen 3 is available in sizes 6-13, so this would be a clear way to spread testing across a good range of sizes to ensure it performs consistently across rings.
Features
Since the Gen 3 launched, Oura has been busy adding more features to its smartphone app to do a better job of tracking your habits and activities. It looks like another area it could look to improve is how Oura factors in what you eat.
While it might not necessarily go as far as being able to detect what you’ve had for your lunch, a teardown of the Oura Android smartphone app suggests that Oura will add the ability to log meals and mealtimes to grab that more comprehensive picture of your day.
This is of course something that many fitness tracker companion apps already let you do, and the string of coding from the app suggests there will be a manual logging option as well as the ability to take photos of food items. Oura will then look to use AI to analyse items to help make the job of logging meals an easier one.
Screenshots of the meal-logging user interface indicate that Oura aims to use this information to help users better understand the impact of when and what you eat can have on sleep and your circadian rhythm.
That is the 24-hour cycle where the body carries out essential functions. Various things can impact on maintaining a good circadian rhythm and that includes good quality sleep.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
While those purported first images suggest Oura will look to alter the design of its sensor array, it may also be adjusting things to improve the accuracy and tracking performance of its sensors. A patent filing spotted by Wareable hints that Oura could look to improving accuracy when monitoring from diverse skin tones.
The filing refers to the different levels of noise that can be produced by different skin tones, which can lead to a decrease in accuracy on monitoring data like blood oxygen levels. To address the difference in accuracy across skin tones, Oura aims to use its sensors to take a number of readings to correctly detect skin tone and factor that into the data it produces.
This difference in accuracy across skin tones is something that has been levelled at wrist-worn wearables that use similar optical sensor setups to track information like heart rate and blood oxygen for some time. If Oura has managed to find a way to address it, that would mark a pretty big breakthrough not just for smart rings, but for wearables in general.
Software
Most recently, we’ve seen Oura make improvements to how it lets users track stress and add more fitness-focused metrics. If you’re an existing Oura user, then you’ll likely be aware of the Labs section of its app, which offers access to features that offer the opportunity to test out experimental features that Oura is exploring.
Two of the latest additions are a symptom radar that allows you to detect early signs of changes to your health by tracking biometrics like respiratory rate and temperature changes. This does sound a lot like the Health Monitor feature included on the Whoop Strap and could be an indicator of Oura pushing a little more into the health monitoring space.
It’s also testing an AI-style Advisor, which is essentially a chatbot that aims to offer personalised recommendations based on your data. So AI could play a big part in Oura’s next smart ring.
We’ll update this article when there are more rumours about the next Oura smart ring.
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