Oura Ring vs. Fitbit vs. Apple Watch: This clinical study makes a great case for smart rings

At TechRadar, I often see wearables competing against each other. Next week you can read what happened when I ran a 5K with the Coros Vertix 2S, Garmin Fenix ​​8 and Oura Ring Gen 4 at the same time. I ran a similar test when pitting the best smartwatches against Strava at the 2024 London Marathon.

One aspect of health tracking that I haven’t tested in the group is sleep tracking. Luckily, researchers at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston did the work for me by comparing the Oura Ring Generation 3 with an Apple Watch Series 8 and Fitbit Sense 2 to find out which is most accurate. To set a benchmark, the three devices were also tested with a gold-standard medical-grade polysomnograph (an instrument used to diagnose and measure sleep disorders).

The results of the study of 35 participants showed that all devices accurately recognized sleep and wake states. However, the Oura ring was best at distinguishing between sleep stages and matched the polysomnograph with approximately 80% accuracy.

Published in the magazine SensorsThe researchers wrote: “The Oura ring was no different from the PSG [the polysomnograph] in terms of wakefulness, light sleep, deep sleep or REM sleep estimation.