Dr. Chris Curry, clinical director of women's health at Oura
Photo courtesy of Oura
LOS ANGELES – Dr. Chris Curry, clinical director of women's health at Oura, sat down with MobiHealthNews for an in-person interview to discuss the Oura Ring's role in women's health monitoring and what sets it apart from other wearables.
MobiHealthNews: Oura has announced numerous partnerships with women's health companies, including Maven Clinic, and it launched new products last year based around pregnancy. How is the Oura Ring different in terms of how it can help women compared to other wearables?
Dr. Chris Curry: I think there are a few ways that we are differentiated in general and in terms of women's health. I think in general, one of our main differentiators is that we are the wearable that people wear.
A lot of the challenge with other wearables is the form factor, and while I am not going to criticize our competitors, it is certainly a different experience to wear a watch or to wear something that is around your wrist. We find that Oura members wear their ring continuously, 23 and a half hours most days. And so one of our main differentiators is that people wear us.
So that gives a really lovely longitudinal signal. It allows us to truly be in the background every day and every night, and so that is true of all of our health features.
From a women's health point of view, we are trying to be very proactive about not standing in a single pillar of health but being end-to-end thoughtful about our women's health journey.
So, you started with sort of the prompt of Maven, the way I think about our women's health journey is foundationally based on very rigorous science that we publish, that we share, that we present and hold up for peer review, with that science built into amazing products.
You mentioned the pregnancy insights feature, so I'll linger there for a minute and just describe what it is and then pull into the Maven side. Our pregnancy insights feature is designed to help our members ask the question, "What is happening to my body?" For folks who have ever been pregnant, there are so many moments in the journey where you say, "What is happening? This doesn't feel normal. I don't feel like myself." And while I, as a physician, can say change is normal, it's a very different thing to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and say, "Is this okay?"
Our pregnancy insights feature is designed to look at your biometrics (heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, heart rate variability), track them across the pregnancy and then compare them to population norms, so that you can say, "Yes, I'm changing, and that change is okay." It's not a diagnostic. We're not saying when the problem occurs, but we are providing that reassurance to say, "My heart rate's higher, that's cool. My temperature is higher, that's cool."
The connected part of it, though, I think, is a very high priority. Wearable data that stays on a patient's phone is not the goal. Wearable data that is generated on a ring, that lives on a phone and that can be thoughtfully passed through to clinical care is that true connection. Science, product, clinical care and then back again. So our engagement with Maven is to take some of our metrics, not raw data, we're not throwing a thousand heart rate variability measurements a day at them, but take metrics that are curated, that are thoughtfully combined, pass them to Maven so that they can ask the questions and be able to screen using that data for things that are off track.
MHN: Do you think that Oura's data will ever be integrated into an EHR, where those are automatically given to providers, such as an OB/GYN, to give more insight into exactly what the patient looks like over time?
Curry: The easy one-word answer is yes. The more expanded answer is physicians are busy. So much of the theme of this conference [ViVE] is that healthcare and healthcare providers are underwater. And so part of our perspective is that Oura generates a lot of really lovely, rich data, and we want to present it to physicians, where they work, when they work, how they work and in a way that is instantly meaningful. We are not trying to give every physician a PhD in wearables.
EHRs are a lot of information. So our goal is not to increase the noise. Our goal is to be a synthesizer and a summarizer and to present things that are the most important when they are the most important, as opposed to just background noise.
MHN: What is next for Oura as far as women's health?
Curry: We have a couple of domains where we are very publicly laying our footprints. We have a very solid footprint in basic cycle tracking and in the fertility aspects that go along with that, and we will continue year-over-year to improve and iterate those algorithms, including an iteration just a few months ago, improving on the precision of our fertile window and our period predictions. We can always learn, we can always get better, and we're not going to rest on our laurels there.
We are working with all sorts of academic and other partnerships to try and understand, cool, so now we understand what's normal in pregnancy. How do we begin to interrogate what's not normal and help with either the screening or that diagnosis or the management of pathologies that are tremendously impactful in pregnancy? I think the ones that are obvious and that we talk about a lot on our blog are things like gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes. For anyone who's been pregnant, you've heard of those and you've been afraid of those. And so how do we work with our clinical partners to make a meaningful impact there?
And then another domain where we very clearly are trying to have an impact is perimenopause, menopause and post-menopause. This is a place that is obviously very trendy right now. There's a lot of chatter in this space, and we want to show up, maybe not first, maybe not fastest, but absolutely the most thoughtful and most meaningful to make sure that we're not just saying we work in perimenopause, but we're saying we understand what the problems are. We understand what solutions we can bring to the table, and we only do it when we can do it in a way that is, again, end-to-end. Research, product and connect it.
