With the ‘wearables’ market exploding, why are so many of us tracking our bodies’ health metrics? Who knew you can wear a ring to do it (perhaps that symbolises commitment)? What are the pros and cons?
Has anyone heard of an Oura Ring? Michelle has one. You just slip it onto your finger and it monitors your resting heart rate, step count (10,000 is the magic number), body temperature, sleep quality, and activity levels and more. You download the Oura app and connect it to your ring, then your health metrics are displayed, analysed, and presented in easy-to-understand scores and trends. The Oura ring falls into a group called ‘wearables’ which can be more convenient than lugging your phone around.
Michelle got her Oura Ring for $300. After the initial free month, there is a $7 monthly fee.
A subscription fee? Really?
“Well it costs way less than a health coach or a personal trainer would!” Michelle says.
She previously had a SmartWatch (the most-used health tracking device) which measured her steps and sleep, but she wanted to measure and find out more. “If I see a good number, or a good graph showing my steps for instance, or I see I got quality sleep, it motivates me and helps me to feel in control of myself and my health. It gives me a sense of achievement.”
The Oura ring also gives you a ‘Readiness Score’ which ranges from 0-100 and takes into account your recent activity, sleep patterns, and direct body signals like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and body temperature that can signify if your body is under strain.
“If I have a low readiness score I sometimes pull a sick day but often I just tweak a few things to improve my score.”
“It’s easy. It’s kind of set and forget, but also set and be reminded.”
Are there any downsides?
“Well sometimes I think I should pay a bit more attention to people around me and less time and attention analysing my stats.”
‘Wearables’ are in.
In a New Statesman article, Sarah Manavis writes that “in 2025, it’s trendy – even commonplace – to monitor any and every aspect of our days: our screen time, sleep, daily sun exposure, weekly social time, resting heart rate, meditation sessions, fasting periods, macronutrients.”
“In the past year, health tracking ‘wearables’ – such as ‘smart rings’ that record changes in your body temperature alongside dozens of other biometrics – have become mainstream.”
There are also smart glasses that measure eye movements which can help analyse stress, detect fatigue, and manage neurological conditions. There are biosensors – typically patches on the skin or small sensors in clothing. And ‘smart clothing’ is getting smarter – for instance, smart jackets that can measure body temperature, heart rate, and lung function.
The Smartwatch is still the most-used health tracking device. A 70-something family friend has an Applewatch Series 11 smartwatch, and I assumed this just tracked her sleep and steps, but there’s more. Its electrocardiogram function can help identify a potential heart rate abnormality, and also notifies you of hypertension (high blood pressure). And for her the Smartwatch is incredibly valuable.
And she’s not just tracking her sleep but what happens while she’s asleep on different metrics. On the Applewatch Series 11’s Vitals app, my family friend member can see her “overnight health data – including heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and sleep duration – and get notified if multiple metrics are ever outside your typical range”.
The Applewatch also provides her a ‘sleep score’, influenced by factors such as “sleep duration, bedtime consistency, how often you wake up and time spent in each sleep stage”.
An Oura ring is not the only ring out there. There is also the SeekZero ‘Smart Ring’. As advertised, “lightweight yet powerful, this sleek titanium ring tracks over 20 vital health metrics – from heart rate and sleep patterns to stress levels and temperature trends”. Twenty vital health metrics? The very idea stresses me. But if I wore it, it would measure those stress levels.
A story called How to Track Stress Levels Using Wearable Technology says “wearables use a combination of HRV (Heart Rate Variability), skin temperature, and sleep data to provide a detailed, real-time view of stress levels”. A Fitbit Sense 2 Smart Watch the Garmin smartwatch has stress score monitoring from zero to 100; the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has stress alerts.
Tracking health metrics is not for me; the very thought makes me feel like a rat in an experiment. In particular, seeing my ‘sleep score’ would stress me out. (I already know I just need to practise better sleep hygiene including limiting blue-light exposure and caffeine earlier and winding down in guided mediations and reading before bed.)
Is monitoring our health metrics via devices good or bad? You can make a case both ways.
As the New Statesman article says, “rather than being encouraged to make minor changes in a few small areas, we are now told that swathes of our lives never previously monitored are in urgent need of intervention – for murky reasons that come under the vague umbrella of ‘well-being’.”
“How many will truly benefit from tracking different parts of their lives? It’s hard to imagine that the purported benefits outweigh the gruelling reality of constant self-monitoring.”
And it’s easy to obsess. “In attempting to smooth down the (supposedly) rough edges of our personhood, we end up highlighting false flaws.”
However, if you need to monitor an illness or are elderly with risk factors – and devices would alert you to danger signs – using them makes total sense. Why wouldn’t you? Also wearables can really help with motivation and accountability to your health goals, as it does for Michelle.
Anuja Vaidya, a senior healthcare reporter and editor, writes that “with wearable devices, healthcare consumers and their providers have unprecedented insight into their health at any given time. Until the 21st century, Americans could only get insights into their health when they visited their healthcare clinic. But now, thanks to wearable technology in healthcare, that information is at their fingertips”.
So good or bad? Like so much else in life, it simply depends person to person. If the very thought stresses you, don’t do it. But if it works for you, all power to you.
