Does the Oura Ring 5 support automatic activity detection?
Short Answer: Yes, the Oura Ring 5 supports Automatic Activity Detection (AAD), which carries over from the previous generation rings. But the feature has also been improved with an updated app, which will work with Gen3 models and later. The ring can automatically sense more than 40 common activities like yoga, pilates, swimming, martial arts, walking, running, and even yardwork. It has also been refined through rigorous testing and algorithm training to be more accurate than ever.
How Oura Ring 5 tracks activities
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Since the Oura Ring 5, like any smart ring, is a circular device you wear on your finger without a screen or buttons, everything is controlled in the app. With AAD, you can begin a specific workout, and the Oura Ring can use its motion-sensing accelerometers and heart rate measurements to determine not only that you're doing something but, in many cases, also pinpoint the specific activity.
This could be housework, walking your dog, or going for a run. Oura says the feature is 89% accurate, meaning it can guess the activity and begin logging it accordingly. It doesn't always get it right, but if it doesn't, you can edit the log and change it to what the activity really was. This level of intricate logging is challenging to accomplish, since most smart rings and even smartwatches with automatic activity detection can only detect specific activities with very distinct movements, like running, boxing, or rowing.
Oura says incorrect activity detection was one of the biggest pain points for customers with previous-generation rings like the Oura Ring 4, so the company set out to fix it. In fact, user input helped build it. The more users corrected the incorrect logging of an activity, like thinking a hike was an elliptical workout, the more these updates were slowly training its algorithm. The update will, as noted, apply to rings dating back to the Oura Ring Gen3.
Company employees also put the feature through rigorous tests to help the machine learning algorithm better detect specific movement patterns. Following the tests, Oura said logging of activities like hiking, yard work, and housework saw up to a 50 percent gain in prediction accuracy. For those who engage in intense activities, you'll also see more data, like more accurate total duration, intensity, and active calorie burn.
It isn't perfect, of course. The device is worn on your finger, which moves less than your arm during exercises but more during activities like typing or washing dishes. This makes it a challenge for the sensors to intelligently figure out what you're doing. If an activity involves limited or no hand movements, such as lifting weights, riding a bicycle, or using an elliptical machine, it might not get it right. But AAD has been refined to take into account certain factors it never did before. Oura even had volunteers take fake showers to train the algorithm not to count movements during showers as activity!
The result with the Oura Ring 5, one of the best smart rings, is that you can not only more confidently go on with your day's regular exercises knowing that the smart ring will track them even if you forget to manually set it in the app, but it may also track activities you never gave yourself credit for before, like walking the dog, doing chores around the house, or dancing.
Being able to simply do an activity instead of telling an app you're about to do it and advising once you've stopped makes the process easier. And these updates to AAD with Oura Ring 5 also ensure you get the credit you deserve for every moment of log-worthy movement throughout your day.
Slim but mighty
As Oura's slimmest smart ring yet, the barely there Oura Ring 5 and is more scratch resistant. That's a good thing because with improved features like more accurate automatic activity detection, you'll never want to take it off.
