Review: Oura Ring, The One to Rule Them All? Apr 5, 2021 Don't have an account? Sign up Collecting health data to help your training is not a new phenomenon. Since Polar launched the first consumer heart rate monitor in the early 1980s it has become endemic among almost all professional athletes. In the beginning, athletes simply recorded their heart rates while training to understand how hard they were working, but in recent years the focus has widened collecting data away from the bike to understand how the body responds to training and how it recovers. As the technology advanced, further measures like HRV, the minute differences between each heartbeat, became possible to measure with consumer tech and sports scientists began to research what this long-used medical marker can tell us about our performance and condition. Today there are a few options on the market that record a range of metrics with the goal of optimising your performance and/or health, and the Oura ring is at the forefront of the current generation of advanced health-focused wearables.