As we gradually recover from the COVID-19 Pandemic, organizations across the globe are searching for solutions that can help us safely reopen businesses.

During this time, Oura has partnered with major research institutions (including the University of California, San Francisco and West Virginia University) to support frontline healthcare workers and contribute to the growing body of research on illness detection, symptom profiles, and recovery.

In light of these advances, Oura has developed a pilot for a Health Risk Management Platform (HRM) platform designed for illness monitoring in workforce populations. HRM can support workforce safety and empower employers and employees alike to stay on top of their health. With HRM, employees can opt-in to voluntarily share relevant Oura data with an employer administrator through a company-wide dashboard. This dashboard provides employers with an overview of illness probability, and aggregates and analyzes key sleep, activity, and health insights to support early illness detection. COVID-19, and other illnesses, may spread rapidly through populations with severe consequences, especially when individuals are unaware they are sick. The development of this HRM solution can help organizations understand illness symptoms as early as possible, enabling them to put employee health first, better manage outbreaks, and institute safety and testing protocols to reduce the spread of infections.

What Is The HRM Platform?

While every Oura user can currently monitor themselves for illness using their smartphone app, the Health Risk Management platform allows employers to offer a voluntary, opt-in program to better manage health across the company. The HRM solution is a new feature of Oura’s long-standing Teams product which allows members of a group to share their data with a “Coach” who can work with individuals to better understand their health or work with groups to identify meaningful patterns.

While Teams has been used by sports teams, physicians, families, and other groups, HRM helps organizations set thresholds for illness probability across their workforce via a simple dashboard, which can be broken down by office or location. Illness probability is assessed by factors such as meaningful changes in body temperature, respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability which indicate if an individual may be experiencing symptoms correlated with certain illnesses or conditions. To protect the privacy of employees, HRM is designed to be an opt-in only platform that clearly communicates what data is being shared with the employer during the opt-in process, and gives the employee the opportunity to opt-out at any time.

Why Oura?

As we redefine workplace safety, Oura is uniquely positioned to be an effective solution for monitoring illness:

  • Accurate sensors: Oura uses infrared light photoplethysmography (PPG), which reaches deeper than the green light LEDs found in most other wearables. Oura uses a ring form factor to measure from the arteries in your fingers rather than settling for the capillaries on the surface of your wrist.
  • Takes your temperature: Oura is one of the only wearables that measures your temperature directly from your skin. Many wearables don’t track body temperature at all, and others only capture the temperature of your external environment, not your body. Temperature is one of your core vital signs and can reveal key insight about your current body status.
  • Personalizes your insights: Health monitoring relies on what is happening in your own body, not on population norms. Oura uses individualized baselines to determine when an individual’s patterns are deviating from their unique normal.
  • Easy to use: Oura Ring is comfortable to wear, has a battery life of up to one week, and does not require users to input, manually upload, or measure anything to participate in HRM.
  • Validated: While Oura is not a medical device, its capabilities stack up against advanced medical technologies.
    • Resting heart rate: 99.9% reliability compared to medical-grade electrocardiogram (ECG) and validated against the sleep lab golden standard – PSG. Read the study.
    • Heart rate variability: 98.4% reliability compared to medical-grade ECG. Read the study.
    • Temperature: Measures changes as small as 0.05 °C.

Las Vegas Sands And Their Path To Reopening:

Oura has engaged a variety of forward-thinking employers to implement and further advance this technology. Las Vegas Sands is the first to partner with Oura to pilot this solution, and will deploy Oura Ring to corporate employees in various roles throughout the organization. In parallel, Oura will support the onboarding of the employees into the consumer product (Oura Ring and App), so they can begin to understand their personalized health insights.

Learn More

Oura offers a unique combination of privacy, accuracy, and peace of mind when it comes to monitoring health.

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