The latest Oura Ring updates will tell you more about contraception and menopause

Oura Ring users will soon be able to get more insights into their hormonal health. The famous smart ring Sleep tracking Other health metrics will add hormonal contraception and updated insights into menopause starting May 6, Ora said Friday.

Oura ring actually provides insights about your cycle and pregnancy along with your fertile period predictions. The new update expands on these features by allowing members to log more than 20 combinations of contraception they use, such as pills, patches, IUDs, and other hormonal methods.

These insights are intended to help users understand how birth control affects things like sleep, recovery, and body temperature. Members who menstruate will be able to use this data to determine what a normal cycle looks like for them based on hormones and hormone-free days.

“When more than half of women in their reproductive years are using birth control and more than a billion women are transitioning through perimenopause and menopause, asking them to rely on trial and error, vague reassurance, or generic symptom trackers is simply not good enough,” Holly Shelton, chief product officer at Oura, said in a statement.

As with any device that collects and analyzes personal data, there are questions about how private this information is and what companies might do with it — or what happens if a data breach occurs. When ora It launched its AI-powered chatbot in April The company, which focuses on women’s health, said it does not sell health data to customers and plans to design “private AI” functionality, which only allows AI insights to be processed and generated on your device.

Data about menstrual health Particularly sensitive. In the wake of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which struck down Roe v. Wade’s federal protections for the right to abortion, many users of menstrual tracking apps have become concerned that such data could be used in criminal prosecutions of people seeking abortion care.

Oura already has a cycle insights feature for those who are Experiencing symptoms of perimenopause and menopausewith a 12-question assessment that identifies symptoms and gives you an “impact on quality of life” score. Once completed, a PDF file containing all your symptoms is created and can be shared with doctors.

New Menopause Insights is similar and provides a self-reported questionnaire known as the Menopause Impact Scale. As some members enter this stage of life, the questionnaire (developed by Oura’s clinical and scientific teams) assesses the burden of symptoms and their impact on quality of life. These include questions about mood, cognition, sleep and daily functioning, which show members how perimenopause is impacting them on a day-to-day basis.

“By connecting hormonal context to the biometric data that Aura tracks, we are giving women visibility, language and evidence that they have never had before at this scale,” Shelton said.

Along with these updates, Oura said it is partnering with virtual health platform Twentyeight Health to connect U.S. members with licensed doctors for same-day appointments. Oura already has partnerships with several virtual healthcare platforms, including Maven Clinic, Medi Health, Evernow, Vida Health, and Progyny. In April, Ora A AI-based chatbot for women’s healthaims to help women answer health questions.