Working in the tech health industry for the company that makes the most popular smart ring, ŌURA CEO Tom Hale is well placed to know where the industry is heading. He has just shared his predictions for 2025 and beyond, and they could hint at ŌURA’s priorities.
One of the key features of the Oura Ring is that users wear it all the time. Even a watch is likely to be taken off at night by some wearers, but the lightweight and discreet Oura Ring stays in place, monitoring your health in a subtle and intimate way all the time apart from when it’s charging.
Hale knows the world he’s working in with granular detail, so his predictions are worth hearing.
First, he believes that an important emerging trend will be embracing preventative care. This makes sense to me. After all, we’ve known for decades that a health service spends much more on curing or fixing ailments than it would if it could prevent the problem in the first place. Hale says this is all about how “how healthcare professionals will make more recommendations around preventative health strategies.”
Hale’s second prediction is also about health professionals and concerns metabolic health becoming front-and-center. Hale says, “Health companies will increasingly recognise this as a critical window into overall wellness.”
That’s interesting because when you put it like that it seems unarguable: understanding your metabolic health, any Oura Ring wearer will tell you, is key to being able to change stuff in your life.
Third, there’s “consumer-demanded holistic health,” by which Hale suggests that as consumers become more educated about their own health—and wearable tech is ideal for this, I’d suggest—“we’ll see a rise in consumer health wearables that support holistic health needs,” Hale says.
Education seems key in this, I think, with an increasing understanding of how our bodies work being essential to improving things.
And finally, Hale talks about AI, which he says could be game-changing: “Artificial Intelligence will transform the UK healthcare system by delivering hyper-personalised health support.”
Of course, this could apply in the other countries, but it’s true that the remarkable National Health Service could really benefit from the kind of bespoke improvement that AI promises to address.
Hale’s predictions are intriguing because he matches a detailed knowledge of his company with a powerful bird’s-eye-view of the health industry.
Reading between the lines we can see what it may mean for Oura Rings, too, with these ideas grounded in research from the company.
