What you need to know
- Oura announced two major features on the way in a May 6 update that will focus on women’s health: hormonal contraceptive support and Menopause Insights.
- Contraceptive support will build on a woman’s chosen contraceptive method to show how it could affect her baseline, while Menopause Insights focuses on symptoms and personalized help.
- Oura’s partnership with Vida Health was introduced in April, helping users understand important cardiovascular changes.
Oura kicks off May with a feature update that offers two women’s health-focused tools to take the guesswork out of hormonal health.
This morning (May 1), Oura announced (via BusinessWire) that hormonal birth control support and Menopause Insights are coming to your app soon. Holly Shelton, Chief Product Officer at Oura, highlighted the catalyst behind this update, stating, “Hormonal health has been treated as an afterthought in both medicine and technology for decades.” The company is looking to solve this by adding birth control support to Oura’s pre-existing Cycle Insights.
Moving away from “piecemeal support,” this new support relies on pills, patches, IUDs, and more to show women how contraception could influence their baseline values over time. When the update is released on May 6, women will be able to record their birth control method and “see the impact of hormonal contraception on temperature patterns, sleep, and recovery.”
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Symptom tracking, along with personalized education, will help women understand what is normal for their bodies.
The flip side of this update launching next week is Menopause Insights. Oura says this remains one of the most “overlooked and misunderstood” phases in women’s health.
To combat this, Oura is said to perform a “symptom assessment,” after which “members receive a personalized dashboard that translates their symptoms into an overall impact level.” My Health View in the Oura app allows users to track sudden changes and view lifestyle changes, stress, and more. Users can save this data and share it with their doctors during a visit to make everything more meaningful.
Make the right decision
Cycle Insights has been available in the Oura app for a while and was updated last fall. expanded their capabilities. This was around the time Oura announced its blood pressure profile study to help users identify possible signs of hypertension. Cycle Insights saw its reporting window expand from one month to 12. Women (if they are Oura members) now have more of a window of context to understand their period and fertile window predictions.
mid april brought another association with Oura, as added by Vida Health, a virtual provider of cardiometabolic care. The goal was to allow Vida Health to leverage Oura’s sleep, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and more, along with its clinical health data to help users identify cardiovascular signs. If a doctor’s visit is recommended, users will be notified.
Android Central’s opinion
I feel like the more information and help we have for women’s health, the better. Sometimes it almost seems like people are afraid to talk about these kinds of things. Women’s health is crucial, as crucial as anyone else’s. There is too much misinformation out there and in most cases there will be someone lurking around trying to piece together what matters to them. But we are all different. It seems that Oura realizes this and is trying to do something that can help.
