Shrinks are gaining access to sleep stats.
What it is: Smart ring maker Oura announced it’s partnering with behavioral health platform Talkspace, allowing users to share health data directly with their therapists.
- Insights are delivered via Oura’s new Share Report function, providing clinicians with an easy-to-read summary of movement and sleep trends.
- Tracking progress between visits, the encrypted data will remove error from self-reporting to help design holistic treatment plans.
- Users can select which information to share over a week, month, or 90-day durations.
Of note, while the Share Report feature is available to all ring users, the therapy integration is limited to Talkspace members.
Oura’s chief commercial officer Dorothy Kilroy says the alliance will add clarity and consumer health literacy to the clinical setting.
“This can have a ripple effect; the more fluent and literate people are about their own bodies, the better equipped they are to have helpful conversations with providers about their mental health and overall wellbeing.”
Why it matters: Share Report was a predictable next step following the debut of its community sharing feature Circles earlier this year, underscoring its aim to encourage conversations about sleep’s outsized effect on well-being.
Oura has aggressively distributed its sleep data across the consumer health spectrum in the past year, syncing with Natural Cycles for birth control, Strava for social fitness, InsideTracker for holistic health coaching, and CGM platforms Veri, Supersapiens, and January AI for metabolic health.
Now, the practitioner-friendly format of Share Report moves the company toward a mainstage role in healthcare, clinical trials, and patient medical records — a direction many wearables makers are heading.
Medical wearables. Answering consumer demand for convenient and preventative healthcare, companies are filling the gaps between DTC devices and doctor visits with increased interoperability of wearables, apps, and institutions.
- 2022: Apple’s Health Records feature added the option for users to share encrypted data from the Health app with providers across 800+ healthcare institutions.
- 2023: Withings received FDA clearance for its ECG-equipped connected scale Body Scan, generating shareable medical reports of biomarkers like body composition, heart rate, and nerve activity from home.
- 2023: Movano Health filed for FDA approval on SpO2 sensing in its women’s health-focused smart ring Evie while primarily positioning the product as a medical device.
Takeaway: The era of hyper-personalized health tracking has arrived, and subjective questionnaires from the doc no longer cut it. Working in tandem with healthcare providers, Big Tech can bring about increased accuracy with a few lines of code, but privacy, regulation, and equity remain a work in progress.
