For clarity, the Oura Ring is a finger-borne wearable that takes the form of a ring-style piece of jewelry. Natural Cycles, conversely, is an app that helps users track fertility. Predominantly, that’s via highly-accurate temperature, with users inputting their data into the app. The Natural Cycles app typically requires measurements to be taken via a basal thermometer. The thermometers measure to the tenths or hundredths of a degree. Summarily, now the Oura Ring wearable and related partner products can be used to track body temperatures automatically during sleep for fertility tracking purposes via Natural Cycles. The FDA has even granted approval for the feature for tracking for that purpose.
How do users track fertility with Oura Ring and Natural Cycles to get or prevent getting pregnant?
Driving the new solution is the Oura Ring’s temperature sensor. Of course, it also offers heart rate, sleep, and activity tracking. This makes it arguably among the best fitness and health trackers on the market, albeit not among the more traditional such devices. In terms of temperature sensing, Natural Cycles takes advantage of up to 1,440 data points from the ring. That’s the number of data points the ring can track on a daily basis. The Natural Cycles algorithm takes that data, with user consent in the app, and processes it. That includes, not only temperature data, but also heart, sleep, and related trends. Natural Cycles utilizes all of these to narrow down fertility windows. Oura, conversely, doesn’t get any data back from Natural Cycles. That means that users don’t need to worry about third-party data sharing on that front.
