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In the future, you may not have to wonder why your Oura ring thinks you had a bad night’s sleep compared to the evening before. The company is launching a new AI health coach that will make it possible to ask questions about certain health metrics and readings, further signaling that AI is playing a larger role in wearable devices.
The AI health coach is called Oura Advisor and it’s launching as part of the company’s experimental Oura Labs program, which lets members try out new features early. Oura isn’t alone; the announcement comes as Google’s Fitbit and Samsung are working on their own AI-fueled health assistants as part of an effort to make the wealth of data that our wearable devices gather about us more palatable and actionable. That’s important because that data isn’t very useful without the ability to interpret it or translate those findings into lifestyle changes, a key area in which wearables have fallen short in the past.
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Oura is also introducing its new AI advisor just a day before Samsung holds its Unpacked event in Paris, where it’s expected to reveal more details about its Galaxy Ring, a direct competitor to Oura.
Oura says you’ll be able to chat with Oura’s coach to ask questions and get personalized recommendations based on your existing habits. The feature will be opt-in, and you’ll be able to choose whether the assistant takes a supportive, mentoring or goal-oriented tone when delivering information. You’ll also be able to set how often you want to receive notifications and your preferred time of day for alerts. The advisor will be accessible through notifications and a card on the app’s Home tab, but you can start a direct chat by pressing the “+” button.
In an interview with CNET, Oura CEO Tom Hale provided an example of how this digital coach will show up in the Oura app.
A screenshot showing what it will be like to interact with Oura Advisor.
Take Oura’s Resilience metric as an example, which indicates how a person’s body is balancing physiological stress and recovery based on a 14-day average. If your Resilience rating indicates you’re not recovering enough, you might see a prompt asking if you’d like to chat about ways to improve your Resilience. The case is similar when it comes to sleep monitoring. If your Oura ring detects that you had a rough night’s sleep, you may see a prompt in the app that allows you to ask why.
Oura Advisor sounds similar to Google’s Fitbit Labs program, which will use generative AI to answer questions about certain health metrics, such as why a user may have felt more tired during today’s run than yesterday’s. Google also announced in March that it’s developing a large language model for personal health data based on its Gemini AI model. Oura is using a combination of different AI models to power Oura Advisor, and Hale says the company has worked with Claude, Mistral and OpenAI.
Samsung has also worked on a digital health coach that would use a large language model to help interpret health data and provide more personalized insights about a user’s health metrics, CNET reported in June. The project appears to be in its early stages and likely wouldn’t be released this year even if it were to continue being developed, people familiar with the matter have told CNET.
But Samsung is expected to discuss its Galaxy Ring and introduce new smartwatches during its Unpacked event on Wednesday. Since Samsung emphasized the role that AI will play in its wearable devices in a press release from May, it seems likely the company will further discuss new AI and health features during the event.
Hale believes Oura’s offering will stand out from competitors like Fitbit and Samsung for several reasons, such as the quality and consistency of its data, the Oura app’s ability to remember information about its users and communicate that transparently and Oura’s use of multiple AI models.
You can share information with the Oura Advisor, such as whether you’re recovering from knee surgery, that will be stored as a “memory.” The advisor will then take that “memory” into account when delivering tips and advice.
“We want to be the innovators here, but we also want to create really, really valuable experiences,” Hale said. “We don’t want to be just like, ‘Hey, we can do this, so we did.'”
Taken together, Oura Advisor, Fitbit Labs and Samsung’s efforts are just another sign of AI’s growing presence in the healthcare and consumer tech industries. The International Data Corporation’s US Healthcare Provider IT Survey found that 39.4% of provider respondents found generative AI to be one of the top three technologies that will impact health care in the next five years.
Generative AI’s growing presence in health apps comes as tech giants including Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft are pushing the technology into new corners of our everyday lives, from editing photos to summarizing documents and writing emails. But creating an AI health assistant presents a more unique challenge due to its personal nature, according to Hale.
“For coaching to be effective, it’s much more nuanced,” he said. “It’s a relationship. It’s about a feeling that the coaching is good, and that you should trust it.”
If companies like Oura, Google and Samsung turn out to be right, AI could be the key to helping us understand a good night’s sleep versus a bad one.