The NBA purchased more than 2,000 Oura smart rings to help prevent the spread of coronavirus when ... [+]
Coronavirus cases in Florida, where the NBA plans to restart its season at the end of July, have been spiking for weeks. Denver Nuggets All-Star center Nikola Jokic, along with Indiana Pacers star Malcolm Brogdon, Miami Heat forward Derrick Jones and two players from the Sacramento Kings, announced this week that they’ve tested positive for COVID-19.
As the league attempts to continue its 2019-2020 season in its Disney bubble, the NBA could use all the help it can get when it comes to quickly identifying players who it suspects of having the virus to prevent community spread and another suspension of play.
That’s where the smart ring from Finnish company Oura comes in. The ring, which you wear on your finger, and its accompanying app measures your sleep, heart rate, temperature and something called Readiness, a score that can predict when a user either needs to take it easy or may be coming down with something. And the NBA has purchased, with the blessing of the league’s players association and at no cost to teams or players, more than 2,000 of these $300 rings for its players and staff to use on a voluntary basis to help keep the coronavirus pandemic at bay. When reached for comment, an NBA spokesperson said the league would wait until its full plans were officially unveiled to discuss Oura and many other aspects of the Orlando restart.
Commercially available since 2016, NBA players including Kevin Love and players and strength and conditioning coaches from teams like the Philadelphia 76ers, New Orleans Pelicans, Los Angeles Clippers and Lakers, Detroit Pistons, Miami Heat, Washington Wizards and Denver Nuggets have used Oura rings to help optimize their sleep and overall wellness. San Antonio Spurs legend Manu Ginobili and Shaquille O’Neal are investors, and tech CEOs Jack Dorsey, Michael Dell and Marc Benioff are famous ring devotees.
In addition to sleep and performance, the ring has also been utilized by users in the past to help detect the early signs of the flu.
“Every flu season, every cold season, we’ve had users come to us and say ‘hey, my data was off one or two days, or even more sometimes, before I felt sick,’” said Harpreet Singh Rai, Oura’s CEO.
Oura’s Readiness metric looks at both your sleep and activity rate over a two-week baseline period and measures four key factors; heart rate, heart rate variability, temperature and respiratory rate. Petri Hollmen, the CEO of a Finnish event planning startup and an Oura user, posted to Facebook on March 12 that his Readiness score plummeted from its usual 80-90 to 54 even though he felt fine. He’d just returned to Finland from a trip to Austria, which had recorded a few coronavirus cases. Hollmen went and got tested, which came up positive despite being asymptomatic.
A researcher at UC San Francisco who’d been using Oura for a sleep study but was closed because of the pandemic suggested to Singh Rai that further research should be done to try to see how useful the ring can be for detecting coronavirus cases. The Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University has been using the ring for over a year and told Oura that they want as many rings as possible to learn more about early detection. WVU found that the ring could detect symptoms three days in advance with 90% accuracy.
Oura CEO Harpreet Singh Rai. Photo courtesy of Oura.
Singh Rai and Oura then took out the four key Readiness variables, temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate and heart rate variability, and turned that into a Risk Score. NBA researchers at prestigious universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford and Michigan relayed to the league’s wearables committee that the Oura ring could be promising. However, several university doctors and experts told CNN in a recent story that not enough research and data has been produced to truly determine whether the Oura rings really work or not when it comes to early COVID detection.
“We know the research isn’t done,” Singh Rai said, quoting the NBA’s thinking, “but if you can see if someone’s temperature is elevated, that’s really interesting. And perhaps we could test people even more.”
Singh Rai and Oura worked with both the NBA and NBPA to come up with a way that data could be shared without the players being tracked. Without consent from the players union, Singh Rai said that he would not have felt comfortable moving forward with the plan. For the players who volunteer to use the rings, their teams will only see their Risk Scores.
“Then only if the Risk Score is elevated,” Singh Rai said, “does the NBA and NBPA call a league doctor and say ‘hey, we want to do an extra test today.’ They don’t even tell them the score. They don’t tell them anything. To do that without anyone feeling compromised from a data perspective was hard to do, but I thought the NBPA and the NBA thought really innovatively about this.”
A look at Oura's ring, charger and app. Photo courtesy of Oura.
The league plans to test every player daily in Orlando and will be using temperature checks, pulse oximeters to help detect positive cases as quickly as possible. Teams who have players that opt in on the Oura ring will have a Risk Score baseline over time, another tool for the NBA to prevent coronavirus spread and save its season.
“Maybe there’s 1% of people among everyone in the bubble where the data looks a little bit high,” Singh Rai said about the Risk Score, “so let’s test that 1% again just to be extra safe.”
Singh Rai said that Oura is in contact with other professional sports leagues in America and abroad, and that numerous colleges are discussing purchasing the rings with the college football season approaching.
“We’re really glad to start with the NBA as partners,” he said, “but other leagues may not be able to test as often from a budgetary perspective. And that’s when Oura can be more effective, even more helpful.”
Though $600,000 may seem like a lot of money for a sports league to invest in a bunch of rings, it pales in comparison to how much the NBA would lose if it had to shutter its season again.
“The NBA realized financially that they have to invest so much to bring basketball back in a safe way,” Singh Rai said.
And with this initial smart ring purchase, Oura has positioned itself to be an integral tool for the NBA and other sports leagues that need to stay on the court and in business.
