Oura is currently being sued over its claims that the ring measures your sleep. Both the law firm bringing the class action suit and Oura itself have released statements giving their opinion on the matter. Below is a breakdown of those positions, along with a broader look at the underlying issue: how much can we trust our wearables when it comes to sleep data?
What Is Happening With the Lawsuit Against Oura?
The lawsuit is a class action suit being brought by Clarkson Law Firm out of California on behalf of Madison Surber, a person who bought an Oura ring. The suit states: “At the time of purchase, Plaintiff did not know that the Challenged Representations were false—i.e., that the Product could not accurately and definitively measure sleep stages.” You can read the full text here.
A press release from the law firm summarizes the problem like so: “The product cannot measure any of the physiological signals required to determine sleep quality or sleep stages. Instead, it delivers only AI-generated guesses that, according to the Complaint, are no more reliable than a coin flip.”
After the suit was filed, Oura published a blog post called “Standing Behind Our Science,” which you can read here. Oura writes: “A recent baseless, opportunistic legal allegation seeks to discredit how consumer wearables—including Oura Ring—track and estimate sleep stages. We dispute these allegations and stand firmly behind our research and accuracy.”
Beyond the suit being filed and both sides stating their position, nothing has officially happened yet, and it may be a while before we hear anything else. The case has not gone to trial, there has been no judgment, and Oura rings are still on the shelves for the foreseeable future.
It’s also worth remembering that plenty of lawsuits never even make it to trial; the two sides often end up coming to an agreement privately, and we may or may not hear what the terms of that settlement even are. It sometimes happens that a lawsuit is announced with sensational claims even if the suing party does not expect to win in the end. What we can examine, though, is whether it’s reasonable to expect wearables to properly track our sleep.
Why You Shouldn’t Read Too Much Into Your Sleep Data
As a writer covering fitness tech, there is a fundamental problem that keeps coming up: companies make their devices report numbers, and device users want to know if those numbers are “accurate.” It’s often impossible to answer that question.
Here’s why. Only a measurement can be accurate: something like “how many beats per minute is my heartbeat?” If this measurement matches a gold-standard reference—ideally on multiple tests over time and with different people—we can judge how accurate it seems to be.
But most things a wearable reports are not, strictly speaking, measurements. They may be calculated from other data. The amount of time you were asleep is calculated from start and end times, and an algorithm had to “decide” when those start and end events happened. Similarly, even for something simple like counting steps, the device has to “know” what movement should count as a step. That’s why we can get different step counts from different devices. And since a watch only has access to movement data from your wrist, it doesn’t know what your feet are doing. Indoor running mileage is also an estimate for those same reasons.
One step further removed from those stats are scores and interpretations. Some are obviously made up: a “79” sleep score doesn’t correspond to anything a scientist could measure in a lab. But sleep stages are also in this category. When Oura reports 51 minutes of REM sleep, it doesn’t know this; it’s putting together the data it has and making its best estimation. Rather than reading too much into sleep stages, it’s more useful to note how long you’re sleeping in total and to pay attention to real-world signals like whether you feel tired during the day. Meredith Dietz came to a similar conclusion after interviewing sleep scientists for this look into why sleep scores are a lot less useful than you would think.
What Does an Oura Ring (or Any Wearable) Actually Know About Your Sleep?
Let’s take this back to the basics. An Oura ring shines red, green, and infrared LEDs on your skin, and its sensors pick up reflections of that light to get a reasonably good sense of your heart rate and an estimate of your blood oxygen. The ring has motion sensors, so it can tell when you—or at least your finger—are moving around. There is also a temperature sensor for skin temperature.
That’s it, as far as measurements in a strict sense. From the fluctuations in the rhythm of your heartbeat, Oura can calculate your respiration rate and HRV. From accelerometer data, it can calculate the times it thinks you are lying perfectly still. Oura has written here about what it measures and what it calculates or infers from those measurements. That post covers the Oura Ring 4—the device named in the lawsuit—but most smart rings and other wearables work similarly.
So the lawsuit is technically correct in saying that Oura doesn’t actually know your sleep stages. But Oura may be able to successfully argue that its estimates are as accurate as you can reasonably expect from any wearable device.
We Will Probably Never Know How Accurate a Wearable’s Sleep Data Is
One of the lawsuit’s claims is worth noting: “Plaintiff does not personally know the mechanism or science behind the Products’ promised sleep tracking features. … Plaintiff had and still has no way of determining whether the Challenged Representations on the Products were and are true.”
Companies that make wearables don’t share their algorithms publicly. Neither the device itself nor the software that interprets its readings is subject to any thorough, public accuracy or validity testing before a device makes it to market.
That’s why tech writers have to make do with “N=1” tests: one person, a few runs, a few nights comparing readings from multiple devices. Renting a sleep lab for every device review isn’t feasible, and doing it properly would require hundreds of participants and a team of research scientists. Ironically, tech reporters are often the first—and in some cases, the only—people to do any in-depth independent testing on wearable devices.
Sometimes scientists do conduct proper studies, especially on popular devices that might have uses in clinical or research settings. But they don’t happen on a schedule that’s useful to consumers trying to evaluate a new product. By the time a paper comes out telling us how the Garmin Fenix 6 performed at measuring heart rate during sleep, Garmin is already selling the Fenix 8—and we’re already on to the Fenix 9.
The Best and Worst Points From the Lawsuit
In its press release, several of the lawyers stressed that customers make choices in their daily lives based on information they get from their wearables. This is true of all wearables, not just Oura, and it’s a fair point. We probably rely too much on data that we shouldn’t actually trust.
Something that doesn’t ring true, however, is the lawsuit’s claim that “sleep happens in the brain, not on one’s finger. It is defined by brain electrical activity, eye movements, muscle tone, and other signals.” Sleep isn’t defined by EEG readings and such—it’s measured that way in the lab.
A scientist doing a sleep study is trying to eavesdrop on what your body is doing, and the tools used in a clinical setting are simply the most reliable ones available for that purpose. A wearable ring is doing the same thing with different, more limited tools. That distinction matters when evaluating what wearables can and cannot reasonably be expected to deliver—and it’s a distinction worth keeping in mind whether or not this lawsuit ever reaches a courtroom.
