Oura Ring’s new feature ‘Moment’ provides biofeedback on meditation
The award winning Oura Ring has received an interesting new feature. Called ‘Moment” it provides feedback on meditation and other mindfulness practices.
Launched a few years ago, this is one of the best smart rings around. The gizmo is perhaps best known for the quality of it’s sleep tracking. Oura Ring automatically detects and analyzes the quality of your rest and recovery by measuring your heart rate, pulse wave form, respiration rate, body temperature, movement and more.
While you are awake, Ōura keeps tabs on physical activity and time spent sitting. The ring counts your daily steps and total distance traveled. It also estimates the calories burned per day.
With this new feature, the biometric ring helps you deal with stress. It does this by tapping into resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) readings from the palmar arteries at the finger. Both measurements are highly correlated with stress and heart health.
If you are feeling stressed, the central nervous system orders the heart, brain and muscles, to prepare for a fight-or-flight situation. This leads to an increase in your resting heart rate. Lower heart rate values are, therefore, generally considered as a good thing.
On the other hand, you should be aiming for a high HRV. Its a bit counter-intuitive, but a healthy HRV should not be beating at a perfect tempo. Research has shown that when your HRV is high, your body is showing better stress resilience and health. Which means, the more variability between heartbeats, the better.
It is a well known fact that regular meditation has a positive effect on stress levels, sleep and overall health. Moment allows you to quantify your progress by tracking your meditation session time, resting heart rate trends and HRV values.
Simply choose a session length and set your soundscape or opt for a silent session. You can use it along with your favorite guided meditation app or video or, go freestyle. While you’re sitting still the ring will calculate the beat-by-beat difference in pulse. Once you’re done, simply close the session, and optionally tag it with a session type and rating on how it went.
The more you use the feature, the more data you’ll have to work with. Keeping tabs on these values will allow you to self-asses how varying meditation sessions affect you physiologically, and choose the best one for your unique needs.
“As a society, we’ve become more distracted than ever and it’s wearing on our bodies and minds. Sleep and meditation are investments in our future self which helps bring more connection, awareness, and presence into our lives,” said Oura CEO Harpreet Rai.
“Moment is an exciting expansion of our services to help our users be better rested, more productive and ready to make the most of every day.”
Oura says Moment is currently only available for iPhone users with a second generation ring and app version 2.6.0 or above. An Android app is set to land later in the year.
The intelligent ring is used by 75,000 individuals in over 100 countries. To find out more or purchase, head over to Ōuraring.com.
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