Oura launches redesigned app and ‘Cumulative Stress’ feature

Oura announced on Monday that it’s launching a new redesigned app experience and a “Cumulative Stress” feature. The company also shared that it’s pursuing FDA clearance for blood pressure features that give users a likelihood assessment of hypertension.

The redesigned Oura app introduces more personalization with three main tabs. The “Today” tab surfaces the most relevant insights for daily decisions, and the “Vitals” tab provides at-a-glance views of things like sleep, stress, and cardiovascular trends. The “My Health” tab offers insights into the user’s long-term well-being, highlighting strengths, trends, and opportunities for proactive care. The tab also includes “Habits” and “Routines” sections to show the impact of daily actions.

The app redesign also brings enhanced menstrual cycle insights, including a 12-month view of period and fertile window predictions, up from the previous one-month view.

The new Cumulative Stress feature helps users understand how their bodies accumulate and respond to chronic stress over time. It provides a stress measurement based on the past month of data and is updated weekly. A person’s Cumulative Stress is determined by five factors: sleep continuity, heart stress-response, sleep micro-motions, temperature regulation, and activity impact.

“It’s much more than just tallying the hours spent in stressful periods,” Oura VP of Consumer Software Product, Jason Russell, told TechCrunch. “It’s actually measuring different bodily functions indicative of cumulative stress taking a toll on your body. So things like how your heart rate and heart rate variability respond after a period of stress is indicative of cumulative stress. Your thermodynamics. How you regulate temperature overnight, how continuous your sleep is. Whether you experience what we call sleep, micro-motions, so not just big movements during sleep, but twitches. There are little signatures that would be indicative of your body experiencing high cumulative stress.”

The new feature will roll out globally in the coming weeks.

On the road to developing an FDA-approved blood pressure feature, Oura announced that it’s introducing a new Blood Pressure Profile study to explore how the company can identify early signs of hypertension by passively tracking key signals in the background.

Oura received approval from the Institutional Review Board for the study, which is launching in experimental hub Oura Labs in the U.S. later this year. Users who are part of the study will be notified of their current likelihood of hypertension by combining Oura Ring data with a short check-in questionnaire on family history, medication, and lifestyle habits. They will receive an assessment that lets them know if they have no signs, moderate signs, or major signs of hypertension.

Members with strong signs will be encouraged to seek professional medical care. The algorithm will also track changes over time, prompting periodic reviews throughout the study, Oura says.

Monday’s announcement comes a week after Oura raised $900 million in fresh funding led by Fidelity Management & Research Co., with participation from new investor ICONIQ and contributions from Whale Rock and Atreides.

It also comes as Oura recently launched its Oura Ring 4 Ceramic collection, its first-ever charging case, and a new Health Panels feature that lets members schedule blood work directly in the Oura app.