Oura patents a Sleep Age metric for its smart rings

Oura may have another age number coming to its app, and this one is all about your sleep. A US patent granted today lays out a Sleep Age metric that compares how you sleep with your actual age, then explains what is pushing that number up or down.

The patent (US 12,721,568 B2) is called “Sleep age determination from wearable-based physiological data”. The original application goes back to August 2023 and was published in early 2025, but Oura has now secured the patent itself.

Oura’s Sleep Age would look at the bigger picture

The basic idea is pretty easy to understand. Instead of simply giving you another score for last night, Oura would work out what your sleep looks like over a longer period and translate that into an age.

So if you are 40 but your sleep patterns look more like those expected from someone who is 32, your Sleep Age could come in below your chronological age. Go the other way, and you probably have something to work on.

Oura describes Sleep Age as a longer-term metric calculated using weeks or months of data. So don’t expect the metric to bounce around wildly because you stayed up late one Saturday night. At least if Oura implements it roughly as described in the patent.

Underneath it all is quite a lot of processing. The ring collects PPG data and can also use information such as heart rate, HRV, temperature, respiratory data and sleep measurements. One machine-learning model classifies the night’s data into wake, light, deep and REM sleep, while another model uses the resulting sleep features to calculate the Sleep Age.

Those features can include how much time you spend in each sleep stage, sleep fragmentation, the midpoint of your sleep and other patterns. Oura also describes comparing the data with baseline sleep characteristics associated with someone’s chronological age rather than looking at each measurement in isolation.

The app mock-up is the interesting bit

The patent drawings give us a much better idea of what Oura has in mind. One app screen shows a Sleep Age Metric of 29 alongside a chronological age of 26, so there is no ambiguity about how Oura imagines presenting this.

Below that is an explanation. In Oura’s example, the user’s deep sleep is lower than normal and this is contributing to the higher Sleep Age. The app then recommends trying cold showers before bed to increase deep sleep and improve the metric.

That explanatory part could make Sleep Age more useful than simply sticking another number on the Today screen. The patent describes providing insights and recommendations based on what is affecting the result, including recognising temporary changes when someone is unwell rather than treating every rise in Sleep Age as a long-term deterioration.

The Oura Ring 5 already puts plenty of emphasis on longer-term interpretation rather than just raw sensor readings, while Oura has also been expanding features such as Health Radar and other health insights to older rings. So if this metric sees the light of day, it will fit in quite nicely.

Oura also already has Cardiovascular Age, so translating another part of your health into an age isn’t exactly unfamiliar territory. Sleep Age would apply a similar idea to something Oura has focused on since the earliest versions of its ring.

Source: Google Patents US20250064387A1