Oura smart rings poised to level up with new partnership

20 Nov 2024, 01:54 by Aakash Jhaveri · Android Police

If you’ve followed smart rings, you will know that the category was pretty much pioneered by Oura. While the segment now has many more players — both big and small — Oura has a new development that should allow it to stay ahead of the curve.

It’s just been a few weeks since the unveiling of the new Oura Ring 4, which addresses some key pain points of smart ring usage. For 2025, the company is diving head-first into the realm of metabolic health monitoring with a strategic partnership with Dexcom.

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A match made in... the kitchen

As a part of Oura’s Series D funding, Dexcom will invest $75M in the Finnish smart ring company, which will be used for international expansion and additional mergers and acquisitions. More interestingly, the companies will work towards creating a health ecosystem that combines the data being tracked for more comprehensive health insights.

Dexcom’s Stelo is a popular line of continuous blood glucose monitoring devices that enables users to observe how the food being eaten has an impact on their blood glucose levels. Priced at $99 for a month’s worth of biosensors, it also offers an app for users to track glucose spikes — an important metric for those with diabetes or other metabolic conditions.

Better data, better insights

“Partnering with Oura gives us the opportunity to redefine the category again, integrating data from Dexcom glucose biosensors with the continuous insights and metrics measured by Oura Ring,” said Matt Dolan, executive vice president of strategy and corporate development at Dexcom

Credit: Dexcom

Come 2025, the Oura Ring and the Dexcom Stelo will be integrated to enable direct data exchange between the devices, helping people decide what to eat and when for optimum exercise and sleep performance. The brands will also cross-sell and cross-market each other’s products as a part of the partnership. it sounds like a logical partnership as one of the key benefits of smart rings is that they can track way more data than a smartwatch. Adding a continuous glucose monitor should supercharge that.

But, what about subscriptions?

The exact way in which the devices will interact with each other has not yet been clarified. Our guess is that there will be a unified app that can connect to both the Oura Ring and the Dexcom Stelo and pull data into one comprehensive report. Since Oura has a subscription fee and Stelo’s smartphone connectivity is an optional add-on, we wouldn’t be surprised if the integration requires an additional upgraded subscription to get the complete experience.

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The Ultrahuman Ring Air delivers a similar range of features as Oura, all without a subscription fee