Oura App Can Now Track Pregnancy and Menopause
Starting this week, the Oura ring app will be able to track your pregnancy stage and will finally tailor fertility and sleep messages to account for changes in your body during pregnancy. Oura also introduced a perimenopause symptom tracking feature based on a questionnaire used in menopause research.
How to Use Oura’s New Pregnancy Tracking Feature
In the Women’s Health section, under the Settings tab, you can now turn on Cycle Info (which has been there for a while) or Pregnancy Info. Turning on Pregnancy Info will hide Cycle Info.
When you turn on Pregnancy, you’ll be asked to enter either your estimated date or the date of your last menstrual period (which is used to determine your gestational age). You can change your estimated date at any time by tapping the settings icon on the Pregnancy screen.
When you turn on this feature, a card will appear on the main screen showing your pregnancy due date (in weeks and days) and a countdown to the next trimester. In addition, your current gestational age will be displayed in small icons at the top of the page.
I tried this feature out, adding a few fake due dates to see what “information” I got. They’re all pretty generic, but maybe some will find them useful. At week 11, you learn that “some women experience a gradual decline in their readiness index and heart rate variability during this time.” At week 17, you learn that heartburn and nasal congestion may be common. At week 20, you learn that you may be more sensitive to caffeine. At week 34, it turns out that your sleep index may be declining, and you should “try your best to find moments of rest, no matter how short.”
More importantly, Oura says that the scores will now take into account pregnancy stage. This has long been a source of complaint on the Oura Ring forums: healthy pregnant women are penalized for their labor readiness and sleep quality because the app doesn’t take pregnancy into account. (Pregnancy affects heart rate and heart rate variability, among other things.) As one Reddit user wrote , “The app knows I’m pregnant. Can I see pregnancy stats here or are we just going to keep saying pregnant women never recover lol?”
This issue has finally been addressed, although Oura doesn’t say it’s changing the way the scores are calculated. Instead, they say the text presented with those scores will now reflect your stage of pregnancy. The app will also show your heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and respiratory rate over time in new graphs that are displayed “along with a reference range derived from anonymized and aggregated Oura population data.” Normally, Oura just compares you to you; it seems like they’re trying to give you some context about what’s considered normal during pregnancy. However, I doubt it’ll be helpful, since each person will have unique data that won’t necessarily match up with everyone else’s. Pregnant women have enough to worry about without “my HRV is too high/low.”
Oura has also added new tags to help you track possible pregnancy symptoms. I chuckled when I read about the tags on Oura’s blog post about the new feature, as it’s a perfect description of what pregnancy feels like: “We’ve added 35 new tags to cover all aspects of pregnancy, such as Braxton Hicks contractions, cramping, increased sex drive, heartburn, constipation, and vomiting .”
How to Use Oura’s New Menopause Tracking Feature
When it comes to menopause, neither the measurements the ring records nor the data it displays change. However, the app can now help you take the Menopause Assessment Scale, a questionnaire used in menopause research . It asks about symptoms such as hot flashes, sleep problems, vaginal dryness, and feelings of depression and exhaustion. You get an overall score, as well as a breakdown by psychological, somatic (body) and urogenital indicators.
Oura calls this feature a “perimenopause check.” The app tracks your results over time and can export a PDF of your results to share with your doctor — or, Oura hopes, one of its “network of women’s health partners.” Those include Midihealth , Evernow , Maven Clinic , and Progyny , all of which are mentioned in a press release about Oura’s new features.
Tracking seems like it could be useful if an Oura user wanted to keep track of menopause symptoms. I have to be a little cynical, given that he thinks the feature’s main function is advertising. It may not be advertising, but it does direct your attention to problems you may or may not have, and suggests solutions that, coincidentally, will make someone money.