All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. It's a good time to be Oura, the world's most prominent smart ring company . The company debuted the Oura Ring 4 in late 2024 with an updated design, slimmer sensors, and software updates. It was an unmitigated success--out of 5.5 million Oura rings sold since its inception in 2013, nearly half of them were sold in the past year.

Have you guys heard of the Oura Ring? You know this is a personal obsession with mine. I've been wanting one for months, and months, and months. I'm not a good sleeper, and this has been giving me some really good insights into my sleep. I got a stressful email this morning, and I swear, about seven minutes later, the ring had logged that I was stressed.

Either you've been getting late-night visits from Freddy Krueger, or the warm milk and magnesium aren't cutting it lately. Many people are turning to ring sleep trackers to help them get better shuteye, and it might be time to give in to the trend yourself. This one by Go2sleep is less than half the price of the famous Oura Ring. And its AI-powered algorithms help monitor more than just your heart rate as you sleep. Slip the Go2sleep over your finger, drift off into your mediocre-quality slumber, and the ring will monitor you all throughout the night.

While the NBA continues to move toward restarting its season with players and other personnel isolated at Walt Disney World in Orlando, details of how it hopes to manage the people on site are leaking out. According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, the specifics were laid out in an informational memo dubbed "Life inside the Bubble," that described testing plans, quarantine protocols and more. Inside the Orlando bubble, NBA players will have the option of wearing a ring that could help with early detection of coronavirus; track temperature, respiratory and heart rate. The part that's specifically interesting to us -- other than players only lounges with NBA 2K and bracelets that beep if people are within sx feet of each other for too long -- is its proposed use of Oura's smart rings. Earlier this month, study results from West Virginia University's Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute suggested that physiological data from the rings, combined in its digital platform with information obtained from wearers via in-app surveys, can "forecast and predict the onset of COVID-19 related symptoms" three days in advance, with 90 percent accuracy.

One of the challenges to curbing the spread of COVID-19 is that asymptomatic individuals, or carriers, can spread the virus before they realize they are infected. In April, researchers from West Virginia University's (WVU) Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute (RNI) and WVU Medicine set out to predict symptoms before they appear using wearable rings by Oura and AI prediction models. Now, the researchers claim their digital platform can detect COVID-19 related symptoms up to three days early with over 90 percent accuracy. The approach is neuroscience-based, and it asks participants to track stress, anxiety, memory and other psychological and cognitive biometrics in the RNI app. Oura Ring collects physiological data, like body temperature, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, respiratory rate and sleep patterns.