Just posted to my Forbes column about why the next frontier in health wearables might be… your face.
Oura CEO Tom Hale told me at Web Summit Qatar that while smart rings are booming, the face is a surprisingly powerful location for future health sensors. Smart glasses, he said, “see what we see” — which means they can track not just movement and sleep, but context like nutrition. Pair that with the rich biometric data available from the ears (something Apple has explored with AirPods), and you start to see a multi-device health platform emerging.
For now, though, Oura is focused on dominating the smart ring category. The company has doubled revenue for three straight years and plans to do it again, with Omdia estimating it owns roughly 74% of the global smart ring market — even after competition from Samsung’s Galaxy Ring. The appeal is simple: less obtrusive than a smartwatch, but remarkably powerful. Oura can detect ovulation days in advance, identify early signs of labor, and is even supporting a 100,000-person blood pressure study — scale that traditional medical devices rarely reach.
“I can’t tell you how many women, when they find out what I do, come up and thank me for being able to conceive,” Hale told me.
Longer term, expanding beyond the finger likely means partnerships rather than building standalone smart glasses from scratch — something Oura already understands well, with more than 100 health-data partnerships, including a high-profile collaboration with Gucci. (That partnership also delivered a lesson in price elasticity: Gucci priced its co-branded ring at 1,000 euros. “Our jaws dropped,” Hale said.)
The bigger takeaway? Consumer health devices are evolving into scalable, multi-sensor platforms — and the line between medical-grade and consumer-grade tech is blurring fast.