Wearables can track an assortment of health aspects, and the latest inclusion could make life a little easier for pregnant women.
Your heart rate. Your blood oxygen. Your temperature and sleep and how many steps you’ve taken and even your antioxidants. These are all things wearables can track and help make sense of in your life, providing a little bit of extra information about how you’re going in life, and hopefully pushing you in the right direction.
Technology has certainly given us an ability to understand more about our lives, and it may yet provide an insight into the act of having more lives, as wearables look to improve with pregnancy related metrics.
While we’ve not seen an Apple Watch that looks into pregnancy beyond cycle tracking, smart ring maker Oura has launched a “pregnancy insights” feature on its smart ring, providing individualised data based on the wearer, covering heart rate changes over a pregnancy, temperature trends, varying respiratory rates, with the informational viewable trimester or in full.
It’s a little different to the health focused data of Australia’s other major smart ring, the Samsung Galaxy Ring, with Oura’s data able to be paired next to a reference range taken from training of over 10,000 pregnancies, using it to view patterns that could be discussed with someone looking after them, such as an obstetrician.
Throughout the smart ring’s use, if you are pregnant, the insights and health advisor become “pregnancy-aware”, a feature that could essentially mean suggestions are toned and tweaked for being pregnant.
Oura has also included a tagging system to connect symptoms, experiences, and emotions specific to pregnancy, connecting moments of change with those connected to pregnancy, such as nausea, food aversions, skin changes, and even Braxton Hicks contractions.
Oura’s pregnancy specific features are something specific to wearers of its smart rings and its service, which is more or less a requirement for using the ring, a little like Whoop’s hardware and software combo.
It’s available on iOS and Android in Australia and New Zealand, with the ring priced from $569 and the software subscription from $9.99 per month or $109.99 per year.
