A Fitbit for My Finger, Five Years On

Can you think of an example of when you first started doing a thing, then what you do shifts over time without you even really noticing?

Looking back at my 2021 post about getting an Oura ring, I wrote about how my new finger fitness tracker had suddenly got me reviewing my stats after every soccer game, emptying my bar fridge, and cleaning my house. The story surprised me a little for how I’d forgotten how much this little gadget had motivated me.

Five years later, and I’m taking an indefinite soccer break. Most mornings the ring delivers a verdict I can already predict based on my choices the night before. And despite software updates, the ring tells me when I’ve cleaned, but it doesn’t do the cleaning for me!

These days, I check the app half as often as I used to. On a recent 2-week hiking and biking trip to the Azores I left the ring (and charger) at home entirely to avoid extra pack, and it didn’t cross my mind again until I got back.

Over 5 years, the app interface has changed along with how I use it. Added doo-dads. There are now scenic pictures behind my stats, and the app calls me cutsie names like “champ.” There are new dashboards too, one tracking “saved activity time” and another breaking down the “energy zones” I’ve engaged and avoided. I look at neither.

I do regularly use the app for a 5 to 12-minute midday meditation break. They’ve added Headspace-style voice narrations with choose-your-own soothing background noises, and there’s one narrator’s voice I like. But it’s stuff I could probably also find online for free.

I also still go back to the sleep performance tracker. Sometimes, Oura and my partner have divergent views about how restless or disrupted (or disruptive) my sleep was. At least the fitness tracker never complains about me.

Overall, 5 years later my Oura’s job has shifted, mostly confirming what I already know I should or should not be doing. It also seems to have an overload of data sitting on top of the two or three things I most care about.

I’ve been reading more lately about personalization and AI in the context of education, and it lines up with something my fellow blogger Nat wrote about her three months of smart watch data: she’s not motivated by stats that aren’t meaningful to her. Like Nat, what I want from the next version of my fitness tracker device is personalization: the ability to say show me what I most care about and hide the rest.

Until then, I guess I’ll to keep wearing it. Not because I need it, but because it’s free for me to use without a paid membership. And, I’d rather have it and not need it 75% of its stats than to need them and not have them.