Does It Truly Matter Which Finger You Put on an Oura Ring On?

I’ve at all times most popular to put on my Oura ring on my ring finger. The corporate says that “for optimum efficiency and accuracy,” it’s finest to put on it in your index finger, however that any finger can work. And in case you ask longtime Oura customers, you’ll get quite a lot of opinions. Does it actually matter which finger you utilize? I spotted I’ve the proper approach to take a look at this—I’ve two gen 3 rings that match my index and my ring fingers. I wore each for practically two weeks to check their readings and reply the query as soon as and for all. 

How I arrange my experiment

As I defined in my four-year retrospective, I’ve worn fairly a number of Oura rings through the years. My present unit is a gen 3 ring (the marginally older mannequin) that I put on on my ring finger. I additionally had a gen 3 that match my index finger, so I might put on each to mattress for a number of days and evaluate their readings. 

I really wore three rings, however left one among them off my outcomes as a result of it turned out to be redundant. This one was a reproduction of the one I had on my ring finger, so I wore it however’s ring finger. It was a nearly-dead one which I had changed when its battery wore out. It nonetheless had simply sufficient juice to make it by means of every night time’s sleep as long as I charged it the following day. The readings have been just about the identical as my different ring finger, although, so I left this knowledge off my outcomes chart for readability’s sake. 

For this experiment, I wanted to pair every ring to a unique account on a unique telephone. The issues I do for you, pricey readers. For the reason that accounts have been all working from completely different (or nonexistent) baseline knowledge, I averted any scores that the app calculates based mostly in your private historical past. I caught with readings like resting coronary heart fee, coronary heart fee variability, and sleep time. The one rating I stored was sleep effectivity, since that mixes a number of measurements from the identical night time.

My outcomes

I’ve at all times felt like my ring finger readings are nearly as good as my index finger readings, however now I’ve knowledge to show it. Take a look at these charts! The readings are sometimes similar, and at all times shut. There was someday the place the 2 readings differed—it is the final day, with completely different respiratory charges and sleep effectivity. On that day, my second ring-finger ring (knowledge not proven) matched the opposite ring-finger ring, suggesting that it is the index finger that was the outlier.

Total, the completely different fingers give readings which might be a lot nearer to one another than the completely different units from this comparability (for that experiment, I wore Oura, Garmin, Whoop, Apple, and Fitbit units on the similar time).

Any of the three placements I used can be completely good for every day put on. So why does Oura say your index finger is finest? I reached out to the corporate for extra info.

What Oura says 

The gen 3 and 4 Oura rings work on any finger, an Oura spokesperson advised me by e mail, as long as the ring matches “tightly and securely” across the base of the finger. So why the choice for the index finger? It seems that’s the finger the place most individuals have the best time getting an excellent match. 

Particularly: “We advise avoiding fingers with giant knuckles the place the bottom is considerably narrower, which may have an effect on match and sensor contact. This is the reason we typically advocate the index finger. If that’s not snug or most popular, the center or ring finger are additionally good alternate options. All three fingers have bigger blood vessels, which assist optimize PPG pulse monitoring.” (PPG refers to photoplethysmography, the optical sensor system that picks up your pulse out of your finger.)

So in case your ring finger has an enormous bony knuckle, you’ll want a bigger dimension ring to recover from the knuckle, and that ring received’t have the ability to sit snugly towards the bottom of your finger. I’ve no drawback getting a safe match on my ring finger, however I can see that my thumb has a big sufficient knuckle it most likely wouldn’t work nicely with the ring. 

One other concern with sizing is that the Oura ring doesn’t are available half sizes, so you could not have the ability to discover the proper dimension on your most popular finger. That stated, the gen 3 rings really feel a few half-size smaller than the gen 4 rings on the similar numbered dimension, so taking part in round with each sizing kits might make it easier to to seek out the proper match in case you’re not choosy about which model of the ring you find yourself with.