Learn how Oura tracks your steps and daily activity to give you a complete picture of your movement.
How Oura Measures Steps
How Oura Measures Activity
How Oura Uses METs to Calculate Energy Expenditure
How Oura Measures Steps
The Oura Ring registers all your daily movements and their intensities, from light housework to heavy workouts. From the gathered data, Oura's activity algorithms are fine-tuned to recognize steps from the rest of your daily movement. Oura is able to identify step patterns within a very small window of time (30 seconds) and with a high level of precision from your finger.
Since total activity includes both step-based and non-step-based movements, it can vary based on several factors. Increasing or decreasing your step count, engaging in different activities each day, or wearing an Oura Ring on your dominant vs. non-dominant hand can all impact your daily activity.
Other wearables or apps may show different step estimates because they use different methods of categorizing steps. Many trackers set a different threshold for what counts as "activity" while others categorize all movements as steps.
How Oura Measures Activity
The Oura Ring uses a 3D accelerometer to track activity, measuring movement in all directions—up and down, side to side, and back and forth. While it captures most daily activities well, accelerometers can have difficulty with activities that involve limited hand movement in one direction (for example, using an elliptical or lifting weights), no hand movement (for example, cycling), or intense movement isolated to your hands (for example, drumming).
For more accurate activity tracking, make sure the ring’s sensor bumps are on the palm side of your finger. For non-step-based activities that are more difficult to measure (for example, yoga), manually adding your activities or workouts on the Oura App can improve the accuracy of your Activity Score.
On iOS, you can import your workouts from Apple Health, and on Android, you can import workouts from Google Fit or Health Connect by Android.
How Oura Uses METs to Calculate Energy Expenditure
Oura calculates your daily energy expenditure using METs or Metabolic Equivalents. MET is a common measure used to express the energy expenditure and intensity of different physical activities. If an activity has a MET value of 4, it means you're burning four times as many calories as you would burn while resting.
The time you spend doing activities with specific MET values can be expressed as MET minutes. For example:
- 30 min x brisk walking (MET value = 3) = 90 MET minutes
- 30 min x jogging (MET value = 7) = 210 MET minutes
One MET corresponds with Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR), or the total number of calories burned while your body is completely at rest. This is part of what your body needs to sustain itself while you're awake. To provide accurate insights, Oura uses 1.5 METs as the lowest threshold for activities that contribute to your daily active calorie burn. This ensures you're only tracking calories burned through physical activity, not the calories your body uses while at rest.
Sedentary vs. Physical Activities
Sedentary activities, like sitting or watching TV, range from 1 to 1.5 METs. Active calories, on the other hand, such as activities like household chores, walking the dog, or dancing, have METs above 1.5.
By using 1.5 METs as the threshold for active calories, Oura prevents you from logging large amounts of calories from low-intensity activities. This helps increase the accuracy of your Activity Score and other activity metrics without overstating calories burned during rest or light activities.
