Wearable Health w/ ŌURA CEO Tom Hale | Health Next Summit

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so we're a supremely mission-driven company that's driven around the idea of improving the world's health. The way we do this is by making health a daily practice. We give you the information, the guidance, the education to change your behaviors to create long-term better health outcomes. And the way we do that is primarily through a wearable. It is different from most wearables in that it's measuring from the point which is the most accurate on the human body. You might say, 'Oh, that's interesting.' But think about it. Who's been to a hospital? Where do they put the sensor? Do they put the sensor on the back of your wrist where there's bone and sinew and hair and all these confounding factors? No, they put it on the tip of your finger. Why? Because arterial blood flow, uniform tissue, and the sensors being approximate give you the most amount of information. So we're a little different from most, which are probably more grounded in science, more grounded in the science of behavior change and the science of measuring. We started with sleep for those of you who know the Oura ring started in sleep. But that was our strategy because we know that measuring at night gives us a really clean signal on the human's body and that way we can make comparisons night over night about small changes in your physiology measured in a very clean way and start to make inferences about how your health is trending or changing. And I think you know we'll talk about it later but one of the things that we can do quite effectively is predict the onset of influenza-like illness. We can see that two or three days before you actually have symptoms which is no mean trick. So the other things that we did after sleep we said we want we know we want to do health. We've expanded kind of the surface of health to include women's health. We can make predictions about your cycle. We can make predictions about when your fertile window is and be you know accurate within half a day. We make a lot of work around metabolic health. You know, we we track we've tracked 10 million meals in the last four months and we start to see those outcomes and how they relate to things like I'm wearing a blood sugar sensor right now, a Dexcom sensor. So, we can see the correlations between your behaviors and the outcomes that are happening on a very kind of like continuous continuous way. And that that that continuity is important. It's actually a set of data that actually hasn't existed before, hasn't even been studied. Now you think about the sample rate of our typical today's medical science is generally expressed over years or a visit to a doctor or a blood pressure you know cuff that you put on the reality is that you start getting paying attention to this when you're sick and our mission is to do that before you're sick and start to give you input feedback guidance education before you get sick. So it's all about preventive health and personalization. Stop there.

Well, I mean, these are sort of, I think, the stock and trade of all wearables. In fact, most wearables started in fitness. And it's a sort of a well-known and accepted scientific fact that if you put a wearable on somebody, they will move more. The question is, can you sustain that behavior change? Can you can you really see an impact on someone's behavior over the long term? And and reality, and I think anybody who signed up for a gym knows this, fitness is actually a relatively churny activity. You kind of get into it for a while and then you kind of fall out of it. And I think one of the things that we really try and seek is to give people both visibility to how they're changing over the long term to give them the motivation and maybe even a little bit of support. Many wearables sort of take the posture of like you didn't get your steps in today. You you know you get off the couch you lazy bum. And I think Oura maybe uniquely in the wearable space is very much about supporting you through your health journey saying hey you know what maybe today wasn't a day for you to you know to go for it but maybe try tomorrow. And that that kind of tonality has I think been part of the secret of the success.

You know, I I think stepping back if you presume that like we have a shortage of primary care physicians, you know, in in the world and we're actually relatively advantaged relative to the rest of the world, we're doing really well. We don't have enough. We probably quarter million primary care physicians, you know, in America today. If you give them 2,000 hours of care, that's about a half a billion hours. That's maybe an hour and a half for each man, woman, and child in the United States. Not enough to change preventative behaviors and care. So the idea of an AI that is like super knowledgeable about you, very empathic, knows what you know, medicine, you know, would say is the right thing to do and is able to provide that intervention. It's a very strong motivational change. We have some interesting stats. We rolled this out about about maybe almost a year ago. So, first of all, women use it twice as often as men and for twice as long. That's interesting. We're we're we're skewed towards women in our customer base, but it's really it's really pronounced. And then the second thing, what do they ask about? Well, they ask about fitness. They're saying, you know, what should I do? What can I do? But they also ask a lot about health topics. And the third thing is we were trying to figure out why that it was skewed this way. And we went to them. We said, why is it why is it that you, you know, like spend more time in in it? They said, 'Well, it knows me really well. It remembers things about me. It asks me questions. It's very empathic and it's very patient.' And what they were really saying was that here was sort of a kind of a health companion that was there to help them on their health journey through a wide range of of parts of their life. It wasn't just any one thing. And and we said, 'Well, that's interesting. What what features would you have us add for?' And they said, 'We want you to be able to to give us the ability to name it.'

Yeah.