When I sit down with Oura's CEO, Tom Hale, in a quiet wooden booth on the outskirts of the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, I notice that he's wearing two smart rings. Is he conducting competitor analysis? No, it turns out. Both of the rings are his own company's devices.
One, he explains, is his personal ring, which contains all his data from the past four years. The second is linked to his beta account and shows him what's coming in the next software update.
For Hale, wearing two rings that run two sets of software allows him to be plugged into every minuscule variation in data. This type of hyperfocus, essential for his job with the world's leading smart ring maker, enables him to understand the ever-evolving experience of Oura customers before they do.
But being on high alert is not what he wants for the rest of us. Quite the opposite, in fact.
"Our philosophy very much is about being in the background," says Hale. "We think of ourselves as calm tech."
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Calm tech is a departure from the majority of other wearable devices on the market, and it seems to be resonating. Over the past year, smart rings, which primarily measure activity and sleep, have surged in popularity, with sales more than doubling to 1.8 million units in 2024, and expected to hit around 4 million units this year, according to Omdia.
Many of us are choosing them over the best fitness trackers. Smart rings accounted for 75% of all fitness tracker revenue in the US this year, up from 46% the previous year, according to Circana.
Unlike standard fitness trackers, smart rings can't provide real-time feedback, stats and coaching on your wrist. Instead, they record and synthesize your activity and sleep data for viewing on your phone at a later time. That's enough for most people. The trade-off is especially worth it for those of us who want to nurture a less anxious attachment style to our personal tech and prioritize a real-world focus.
The majority of other wearables on the market aren't conducive to this "passive" relationship. Smartwatches -- and, for the most part, smart glasses -- are body-worn screens, contributing to the ever-increasing and omnipresent information overload that tech subjects us to.
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