Oura is adding two cardiovascular tracking features to its smart rings, and both focus on how hard the heart works rather than how far someone travelled. The update aims to show whether a training routine is genuinely helping long-term health.
The first feature is called Cardio Effort. It measures how hard a user’s cardiovascular system worked during exercise and how long that effort was sustained. Speed, distance, and calorie counts play no part in the score.
Cardio Effort is calculated for each individual workout while accounting for both intensity and duration. That shift matters for activities where distance is a poor measure of strain, such as strength training or interval work.
Scores land on a five-step scale. Light means substantially lower cardiovascular strain than the user’s usual baseline. The scale then moves through Fair, Maintaining, and Building before reaching Reaching. A Reaching rating means markedly higher exposure relative to baseline.
That framing helps people read accumulated load across a full week. One very hard session looks quite different from five moderate ones. Oura now treats the weekly total as the signal worth watching.
The second feature is automatic VO2 Max, which estimates aerobic capacity. Oura rings already offered a version called Cardio Capacity, but it required a six-minute walking test for calibration. That step made the older metric cumbersome to maintain.
Automatic VO2 Max removes the walking test and launches as a beta feature through Oura Labs. Once activated, readings appear in the My Health Heart Hub section of the app. Users see a current estimate rated low, fair, high, or peak.
The hub also shows how aerobic capacity has changed over time. Oura adds personalised insights for when the number meaningfully shifts or stays consistent. A sudden drop can point to fatigue, illness, or overtraining.
Wearable makers spent years chasing sleep scores and step counts because both are easy to explain. Cardiovascular load is harder to fake and sits closer to real health outcomes. VO2 Max in particular predicts mortality risk better than many familiar metrics.
Oura has not said when either feature leaves beta. Cardio Effort and VO2 Max both need enough history before the ratings mean much, so new users should expect a settling period while the ring learns a baseline.
The update puts pressure on rivals to move past simple activity totals. Smart rings now compete on interpretation of the data rather than raw measurement alone.
Read the original report at The Verge.
Related reading: OpenAI plugs ChatGPT into Epic’s patient records and Meta keeps selling camera glasses as Dutch groups plan a court case.
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