What does the red light on your Oura ring mean?

Health and fitness wearables are currently experiencing something of a renaissance, like the Oura Ring and smartwatches. In Oura’s case, it’s a sleek, lightweight smart ring capable of tracking all kinds of health metrics, from sleep to heart rate to temperature. In fact, it includes so many advanced features that it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of what different indicators, including a red light, actually mean.

A red light on a health tracking device might seem alarming, but don’t worry: If you’ve grabbed an Oura Ring 4, one of our favorite smart rings, and it shows a red light, that just means it’s actively measuring your blood oxygen levels (SpO2) while you sleep. The sensor monitors changes in these levels, which can be important indicators for your overall health. Most people’s blood oxygen saturation level should be between 95% and 100%; a reading too low which may indicate a potential problem. Please note that this feature is not available on Oura Rings Gen2 or older.

While you sleep, the Oura Ring sends pulses of red and infrared light into your finger using its LEDs. Highly oxygenated blood reflects more red light than infrared light; conversely, low levels of blood oxygenation mean more infrared light is reflected. The ring measures this and reports the data into the Oura app. You can find it on the sleep screen, but first you need to make sure your Oura Ring’s sleep tracking is working properly.

You can see your average blood oxygen score, which is the percentage of oxygen in your blood over three hours of sleep, as well as a graph of your breathing regularity. This will give you an idea of ​​any irregularities in blood oxygen levels over time and is not the same as respiratory rate, which is based on breaths per minute.

Normally, you won’t see these red LEDs light up during the day, but you can spot them whenever the ring detects sleep. If you relax and your heart rate, BPM, and movement reach low levels, the Oura ring may think you’ve fallen asleep and start reading your SpO2.

Tracking breathing regularity and average blood oxygen must be manually enabled before the Oura Ring begins measuring while you sleep. To do this, find the hamburger menu in the Oura app and select Blood Oxygen Detection, then tap the button and enable it. To activate it, your ring will need to be connected to the app via Bluetooth. The next time you sleep more than three hours, your scores should appear on the app’s Sleep screen.

Breathing regularity appears in the app as a color-coded timeline with an optimal score showing no major variations. A good rating will be displayed as dark blue vertical lines, while a good rating will be displayed as light blue. Frequent changes in your blood oxygen level, which appear as white lines, may indicate a problem with breathing or oxygenation. So you will need to pay special attention in this case. There are also suggestions on how to improve your breathing regularity, accessible by tapping the information icon.