Prevention is better than cure: how the Oura Ring could transform medicine

COULD THIS HEALTH TRACKER STOP YOU GETTING ILL IN THE FIRST PLACE?

- JESSICA SALTER FINDS OUT

Picture the scene: breakfast time in a hectic family kitchen, with homework, work emails and chatter. A monitor sits discreetly on a counter, showing not only the weather and family calendar, but everybody's health stats. One child might be about to come down with a cold; another needs an early night after too-little REM sleep. Someone else needs motivation to exercise after a sedentary day, while another, newly diagnosed with pre-diabetes, receives AI nutritional coaching over a bowl of porridge.

It sounds futuristic, but it may not be far off for fans of Oura - the Finnish company behind the healthand sleep-tracking ring worn by more than 5.5 million people, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston. Oura's chief executive, Tom Hale, believes that, thanks to the firm's vast bank of biometric data, the ring's predictive power could soon transform healthcare itself. "Medicine has been trying to get people to change their behaviour for 100 years," he says over a mint tea at 180 Strand. "We know what to do. The problem is getting people to do it."

Oura's mission now is to become a hi-tech preventative care tool - moving away from solely being perceived as a sleep tracker. And thanks to $900 million (£675 million) of funding announced two weeks ago, which took the company's valuation to $11 billion (£8.3billion), it is in an even better position to get there.