Health tracking usually means strapping a bulky smartwatch onto your wrist and then remembering to charge it every few days. The Oura Ring 4 takes a completely different approach by putting comprehensive health monitoring into a sleek ring that disappears on your finger. You forget you’re wearing it within minutes which can’t be said about even the smallest smartwatches on the market.
Amazon dropped all colors and sizes to $249 for Black Friday, down from $349, and marks a record low that makes this discreet fitness tracker genuinely accessible. The 29% discount applies across silver, black, gold, and stealth finishes in every ring size.
Finger-Based Sensors
The position of a ring on your finger gives cleaner biometric signals than is possible with wrist-based devices. The arteries in your fingers sit closer to the surface, with less interference from tendons, bones, and movement artifacts. This placement captures heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood oxygen levels with improved accuracy compared to the traditional fitness trackers.
Sleep tracking represents the Oura Ring’s greatest strength: an analysis of your rest in granular detail that actually displays patterns invisible to casual observation. It tracks the stages of sleep, movement, temperature variation, and calculates sleep efficiency scores. When you wake up, you get a detailed picture of how well you actually slept, rather than how many hours you spent in bed.
It takes a variety of health metrics and puts them into one daily number that shows if your body is ready for intense activity, or if you need to recover. Sleep quality, heart rate variability, body temperature, and recent activity levels are factored in to give an estimate. A high score would suggest that you can push hard in workouts, while lower scores recommend taking it easy.
Temperature tracking reveals small variations in your body’s baseline that are indicative of various states of health. It is used by women for cycle tracking, where body temperature changes predictably across menstrual phases. The ring spots illness before you feel any symptoms, often showing a rise in temperature a day or two before the worst cold symptoms set in.
Battery life reaches about a week on a single charge, and dramatically outlasts smartwatches that need daily charging. The wireless charger tops up the ring in about an hour, and you’re even able to charge while working at your desk. That extended runtime means you capture sleep data every night without needing to charge before bed.
Activity tracking counts steps, active calories, and movement throughout the day. It doesn’t require workout logging, as the ring automatically detects activities and categorizes them accordingly. Heart rate monitoring during exercise shows intensity levels and recovery patterns. The main focus remains on daily activity rather than detailed workout metrics which suits users who want health insights without obsessive exercise tracking.
The Oura app presents all this data in clean visualizations, highlighting trends and actionable insights. Daily scores for sleep, readiness, and activity provide easy status checks without the need to deep-dive into charts. The app can identify patterns across weeks and months, showing how changes to lifestyle decisions impact health metrics. Personalized recommendations based on your own data help one improve scores rather than just broad, generic advice. The cost for the subscription model, after the first month is free, is $5.99 a month, which grants access to full features and historical data.
At $249, you’re getting premium health tracking in a form factor that traditional fitness trackers can’t match. Apple Watch and Fitbit devices cost similar amounts, but require wrist real estate and daily charging. This Black Friday pricing opens up the Oura Ring to users who want in-depth health data without the commitment to the wrist.
