Oura Ring 5 Drops Two Sensors, Calls It Focus

The Oura Ring 5 measures your sleep, heart rate variability, and readiness to work — and costs $299.

The Ring 4 did much the same thing. Most reviews call the upgrade incremental, a sign of maturity in the category.

But the observation worth making isn't about the upgrade path. It's about what Oura stopped measuring. The Ring 5 dropped skin temperature and blood oxygen monitoring, features the Ring 4 had.

Oura framed this as simplification, as focus. The language of restraint has become compelling in technology marketing because it suggests wisdom rather than constraint. Except in this case, the constraint is also a choice about what health data matters. The smart ring category still doesn't know what it's for. Fitness trackers measure exertion and movement. Smartwatches layer in notifications and apps, but smart rings measure what you can't see. They track the autonomic signals underneath behavior and the data that might predict burnout or illness before you feel it.

By dropping SpO2 and temperature measurement, Oura is answering that question for you. It's saying sleep scoring and readiness algorithms are the solvable problem — everything else is noise. The "less is more" framing makes this choice sound philosophical when it's actually strategic. The company is narrowing the bet in order to deepen the algorithm, becoming more like a software platform that happens to need hardware than a hardware platform that uses software to interpret data.