I’m tracking my sleep and recovery with it. Our ring for Almost five years nowAnd today I’ll share with you several of my favorite and most overlooked features — including one you should turn off, and one you can use even if your subscription expires.

Turn off blood oxygen sensing to save battery.

The Ora Ring uses significantly more battery with blood oxygen sensing turned on. It might make sense to use this feature if you have a specific health concern, but most of us don’t need it on a daily basis.

you will get Blood oxygen sensing Under the hamburger menu, and can turn it off from there. You’ll lose the “average blood oxygen” and “respiration regularity” measurements, but you’ll gain an extra day or so of battery life.

Sync workouts so you don’t have to log them all with your ring.

I Said before And I’ll say it again: the Aura Ring is not a great exercise tracker. Wearing a ring interferes with weightlifting workouts and doesn’t have enough accuracy to seriously track other workouts like running.

However, Aura is a great companion to other workout apps. If you track exercise with another device or even with a phone app like Apple’s fitness appyou can ensure that those workouts are properly synced so that they appear in your Aura timeline. go to Settingsand then to do Apple Health (iPhone) or Health Connect (Android). Turn on these integrations from there.

Tag (and laugh, if appropriate) the automatically detected exercise.

In addition to syncing workouts, Aura will automatically detect workouts it thinks you’re doing. You will then see a card asking you to label the exercise. Don’t just ignore these cards — ours learns from your tags.

So if you’ve gone for a walk, make sure the activity is tagged as a walk. But sometimes it will tag another activity as exercise when it actually wasn’t. I’ve seen hair brushing and flossing tagged as different forms of exercise. Take a look at the time the activity was logged, and think about what you were actually doing at the time. (You can dismiss this activity if it wasn’t exercise or something you want to track.)

Consider the charging case.

The Aura Ring only needs to be charged once or twice a week, but that means it’s hard to get into a regular charging routine. I found the perfect balance charging it when I’m at the gym. Some people like to charge while in the shower.

Short top-ups every few days are best for battery health. (Daily charging is arguably too much; charging only when the battery is dead is probably too little.) We recommend keeping the battery between 25% and 80% if you can.

So figure out where and when it’s most convenient to charge, and keep the charger there. So the charging case is handy — you can carry it in your gym bag, for example. Unfortunately this It costs an additional $99 to purchase a charging case.but no one ever said owning an Aura ring was cheap.

gave Trends The hamburger menu item is one of Aura’s best hidden features. Tap it and you’ll be able to see things that have changed in the last several weeks. For example, as I write this, I can see that my resting heart rate has improved over the past 8 weeks, returning to my “baseline” after some time in which it was higher than normal.

If you’ve been diligent about tagging behavior and lifestyle factors, you can see their effects on your productivity, sleep, activity or stress. For example, I want to know if my mood improves when I take a vitamin D supplement in the winter. Mode isn’t one of the items that Aura tracks, but I can tap. Trends and then select Stress or to sleep Or even Activity (all the things that hurt when I’m feeling sad) and see if the days I tagged “vitamins” correlate with high or low levels.

Log meals without calorie tracking.

Food tracking was introduced as a companion to glucose tracking, but you don’t need to track your glucose to use the food feature. Log your food (you can even take a photo of your plate) and Aura will give you feedback on how healthy the food is.and keep track of whether or not you’re eating on a regular schedule. Calorie tracking is not included. In fact, if you want to keep calories out of your Aura app entirely, see the next thing.

Adjust the purpose of your activity.

Oura will give you an activity goal each day, usually a certain number of calories. If you think your goals are too ambitious (or not ambitious enough), move on. Activity screen and select Edit the purpose of the activity.. You can choose a different goal, and you can also choose whether you want to see the goal in calories or steps.

If you want to avoid seeing calories anywhere in the app, there’s a toggle for that. On the same screen, select Calorie Opt Out. It sets your goal in steps and ensures that calories are hidden anywhere in the app. You can also access the calorie opt-out. Settings And then Activity.

Use rest mode for travel, periods, and more.

Aura has a rest mode setting that is intended for when you are sick or recovering from an injury. (We may also ask you to turn it on if your data suggests you’re not doing well.)

But it’s useful for more than that. Rest Mode pauses your goals, and stops giving you readiness scores. is great for anyone When you don’t want the app to bother you with what you should be doing. I have seen Aura users use it on days of their period when they are not feeling their normal activity. It’s also useful for traveling when you know you’ll be stuck in a car or plane all day, or when jet lag will affect your sleep.

Use Labs to participate in studies (and peek at new features)

If you want to beta test new features, see Labs Hamburger menu item. Offers will change from time to time, but often these are new features. Right now, I only see one offer a A blood pressure profile studyIn which Ora is collecting data to provide blood pressure estimates in the app in the future.

When I signed up for it, I had to fill out a questionnaire and sign a research consent. (Not all Ora Labs items are studies, but they can be.) I can see that Ora thinks I probably don’t have high blood pressure (correctly) and is basing it in part on my resting heart rate and activity level. Aura’s other features, such as food tracking and signal radar, first made their debut in the labs.

Download your data from the cloud.

This is one of Oura’s lesser-known features: a web dashboard where you can see long-term trends, And A “Membership Center” where you can download all your data. This spreadsheet download is available even if you don’t have an active subscription, but you do need a subscription for Trend Viewer and all the software features I mentioned above.

For web viewers, go to cloud.ourarring.com. Here, if you click on Trendsyou can see. all Your data – five years worth to me. You can even compare two variables and see a calculation that shows whether they are correlated. My sleep score and total sleep time are highly correlated. My HRV and no bedtime.

To download a CSV spreadsheet of your data (with or without a subscription), go to Membership Center And sign in. select Export the data. And then Request your data.. You’ll get a zip file full of spreadsheets that you can analyze to your heart’s content.