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Comment by amacbride | Hacker News Reader

Ultra-low power indeed: I often get 6+ days of use before having to recharge. I’ve been very happy with mine; the sleep tracking seems quite consistent with my subjective experience, and the activity/exercise detection matches closely with the data from my Apple Watch.

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I love the aura ring. AFAIK it is clearly the best non-intrusive sleep tracker and I would recommend it to anyone for sleep tracking. But in my experience the activity tracking is horrible because the ring achieves low power consumption by being off most of the time. I would suggest using a different device for daytime activity tracking.

Yep. It's useless for activity tracking.

It thought I was sedentary while I was doing a spin workout.

They still don't have a way to manually start activity tracking via an app.

You can tag a ‘workout’, right? Start time, duration, and level of intensity.

It's not useless for activity tracking. It _may_ be useless for spin workouts though.

I've worn it with a gear fit and phone based trackers at the same time and the deltas are negligible in my experience.

Serious question - what is sleep tracking useful for? While I can see the benefit of tracing activity, I have no idea why would I want to track my sleep. I fall asleep, I wake up, what is there to track? Or rather, even if it tells me that I had a period of less/more movement during the night, what kind of actionable information can you possibly get out of it?

It allowed me to identify food intolerances that had a significant impact on my sleep.

Very cool, mind sharing some? Others may have the same.

Sorry for the late reply. For me it was Fructose and Sulfites. See my above comment for more details.

I am struggling with a similar problem (food, and gas in particular, affecting my sleep) and was wondering if you'd be willing to share more about your experience.

Sorry for such a late reply. For me the two biggest culprits are sulfites (increased sleep disturbances) and fructose (reduced deep sleep and more chaotic cycles).

What's weird about the fructose is I don't have the symptoms associated with such an intolerance; namely gas. Good news is that there is an enzyme (Fructaid) that helps mitigate it for me, so I don't have to completely cut it from my diet.

In the US, sulfites can be sneaky. Labels are required to list them if directly added to a product, but not for sulfite-containing ingredients sourced from a third-party. So the raisins in that trail mix very likely contain sulfites.

If you wake up happy, energised in a consistent manner then there isn't much to get out of sleep data. But a lot of people don't sleep consistent times with consistent results and not knowing why that happens leaves you with little control on how to improve your sleeping.

Without proper sleep, life loses a lot of its value.

I'm building some unobtrusive alerting with mine (they have a public API). I'm bipolar, and less sleep is often correlated with a hypomanic episode. My oura helps me track my overall sleep and see patterns over time.

It also shows when I woke up in the middle of the night, which isn't always obvious to me when I fall back asleep soon after, but definitely impacts my sleep quality.

So many ways it's useful.

Wether you have trouble sleeping or not, it allows you to measure what "good" and "bad" is for you.

If I have alcohol before I sleep and don't use a sleep tracker, I generally assume I have a bad nights sleep. But my interpretation is all anecdotal. A sleep tracker can tell me though that I get up X more times when I have alcohol, I sleep Y less hours in each stage, I have a higher heart rate by Z much, have a lower heart rate variability, etc.

And you may think "so what?" We'll, that's the whole point. Now you know...not just "kind of know" that alcohol is bad for you.

It allows you to confirm what you think may be true, but can't prove.

Do you really need it to prove that drinking alcohol, especially before bed is bad for you? This is a well known medical fact. I don't see the point...

> I fall asleep, I wake up, what is there to track?

Oh man, I remember those days. Enjoy them while you have them.

This may sound obvious but I find the main benefit is that when I have data on my sleep I find myself being more intentional about my sleep patterns. Because I can see the results of an intervention to, say, go to sleep earlier, I feel like I have more control over my sleep patterns.

For myself the sleep duration tracking is the most useful data generated from sleep tracking.

I used it to see what causes good and bad sleep. It's mostly useless after that.

I have an Apple Watch that I wear overnight and have a sleep tracking app. Have you compared your ring to your watch to see if they report similar results? I have been considering the ring for HRV tracking (the Apple Watch only tracks HRV at random times when you are still, whereas the ring apparently tracks continuously) but also wondered if the sleep tracking is superior. Thoughts?

I started wearing an Oura ring about 10 days ago, and I’ve continued wearing my Apple Watch at night to compare the data collected by the ring and a couple of apps I use (AutoSleep and Pillow). Feel free to send along any specific questions (email is on my profile) about how they compare.

It's worth to know that the watch also tracks HRV whenever you use the Breathe app, so if you want to get consistent HRV readings the easiest way is to use Breathe once a day (for example right when you wake up).

So it basically consumes 3-4 mAh a day? That's crazy little.

Would you recommend it? I've looked at them a few times & have been close to buying one a few times.

I'd totally recommend if you want to form a healthy sleeping habit. It helped me understand my body a lot and put me in the right direction in terms of having quality sleep. The activity tracker in my opinion is good and a bonus but not as important as sleep tracking

I've had mine for about 6 months now and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in sleep tracking.

As others have said, watches and other devices are better for generic activity tracking, but the Oura ring is just so easy to wear to bed. No worrying about battery life or sweaty wrists.

The readiness and sleep scores the ring gives me are pretty much on point every time and make it easy to quantify your sleep to actual numbers you can compare with other data.

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