| Wearables aren’t just for wellness and consumer tracking these days. They’re increasingly becoming a part of a bigger conversation in the healthcare system overall. |
| One of the clearest examples I’ve seen of this is with the Oura smart ring. |
| Jason Oberfest, Oura’s VP of healthcare, told me that Oura’s healthcare ambitions started with research. Investigators came to Oura wanting to use its ring in studies — especially when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. (Remember that NBA partnership?) Now, Oura is moving into more clinical use of the ring
through partnerships with organizations like Maven Clinic and Medicare Advantage plan Essence Healthcare. It raised $200 million last year, partly from Dexcom, which makes continuous glucose monitors. |
| Ricky Bloomfield, who joined Oura in March as its first chief medical officer, told me that some of the work around predicting Covid-19 based on Oura temperature readings was one of the turning points for the company to think beyond wellness. The idea is, can you make a wearable’s data useful for a clinician
when you’re inside their office for an annual visit? Bloomfield said Oura is working on other detection features, including some that will be regulated by the FDA. (It won’t be the first — Apple Watch and Fitbit have FDA-cleared features, including EKGs and sleep apnea detectors). |
| To get to a point where an Oura ring might be useful for monitoring a chronic condition, there’s more work to do beyond how wearables have historically been studied. There’s no clear data showing that these devices keep people healthier in the long run, which the medical world would want to see. To try and close that gap, Bloomfield said he’s hiring a director who will be focused on clinical outcomes research. |
| “A lot of that general work has been done, but what's missing is more concerted effort on hard clinical outcomes,” Bloomfield said. “That's absolutely necessary for this type of work,” he added. |
| As a reporter, I’ve tested my fair share of wearables — though not Oura’s ring. But I’ve always found wearables that don’t have a screen, that gather data in the background, as the most compelling. Any time I’ve worn a device with a screen, I’ve been distracted by it. I currently don’t use a wearable. |
| But if there was more evidence that the data I was gathering might have an impact on my health — say, if my doctor asked me to wear one to measure certain vital signs during pregnancy — I might be persuaded. Bloomfield said that’s starting to happen, as clinicians begin to trust data coming from these devices. AI can help make sense of all the data coming through, and then embedding the data into the clinical workflow is starting to come together as interoperability improves. |
| Ultimately, that could lead to more people wearing smart rings. |
| “If we can prove the value to clinical teams and by extension, clinical outcomes and financial benefit to payers that is huge, and that will get more people to the point where they're able to benefit from a technology like this,” Oberfest said. |
| - Lydia |
