The Oura Ring offers a growing suite of reproductive health features, including Cycle Insights and an integration with the Natural Cycles app.
What is Cycle Insights?
How Cycle Insights Works
How to Use Cycle Insights
How to Turn Off Cycle Insights
Things to Keep in Mind
More Information
What Is Cycle Insights?
Cycle Insights is an upgrade to Period Prediction and allows members to better understand their full cycle by tracking the two main phases, follicular and luteal. Cycle Insights still allows members to predict their period and now also provides information about how the full cycle impacts the entire body. The feature is only available to active Gen3 members.
How Cycle Insights Works
Different hormone levels in each phase contribute to natural temperature fluctuations in the menstrual cycle. Cycle Insights uses these temperature deviations to accurately track, predict, and visualize your monthly cycle.
The feature is designed for individuals who have a menstrual cycle and a natural hormonal cycle. You'll need at least 60 nights of data recorded to establish your personal body temperature baseline in order to see your cycle phases.
Read more about How Your Menstrual Cycle Impacts Your Entire Body.
Cycle Phases
The menstrual cycle has two main phases, the follicular phase and the luteal phase. During the follicular phase, which is from the first day of menstruation to ovulation, rising estrogen levels may cause your body temperature to decrease. During the luteal phase, from ovulation until the next menstruation, rising progesterone levels usually elevate your body temperature.
Period Prediction
Oura uses your nightly body temperature, along with other biosignals like HRV, to make your multi-day period prediction window. Your period prediction windows are created from comprehensive data that builds over time, not single intakes. Historically, most period tracking solutions rely on the calendar method, which uses your last period start date and a user-inputted cycle length to predict the start of your next cycle. However, periods can change from cycle to cycle and be impacted by various factors like stress, diet, and illness.
How to Use Cycle Insights
Current members who have opted into Period Prediction will see a home card to upgrade to Cycle Insights. You'll be prompted to indicate if you use hormonal contraceptives or other hormones.
Members new to Cycle Insights will see a home card about the feature and be guided through an onboarding flow, which includes a few questions on your cycle, including when your last period started, how long your cycle typically is, and whether you use hormonal contraceptives or other hormones.
If you use hormonal contraceptives or hormones, your natural temperature deviation may be impacted. You can still use Cycle Insights, but you will only see period predictions and not cycle phases or related insights. You can update your answer to the hormone question at any time in the Settings menu.
In order to see cycle phases, you must confirm the start date of your period each month by using the "Log period start" button via the Cycle Insights home card or detailed view, or the + button on the bottom right of the app.
Using any tags (for example, "period," "Positive LH test," or "Positive pregnancy test") will not indicate when new cycles begin and, therefore, not display cycle phases.
Data collected is used for the Cycle Insights feature only and is never shared outside of Oura (see our Data Privacy Policy). You can toggle the feature on and off or delete your data in the Settings menu at any time.
You will see Cycle Insights directly on the Home tab, under the Readiness and Sleep cards. You can tap into the Cycle Insights home card to find additional information around temperature and your cycle history. In the detailed view, you'll be able to see the below data:
- Body temperature metric from last night
- What phase you're currently in (blue for follicular phase and purple for luteal phase)
- What day of your cycle you're on
- Educational information related to your current phase
- Estimated next period start
- The ability to log period start
- An option to click to the calendar view
How to Turn Off Cycle Insights
You can choose to turn on or off the Cycle Insights feature at any point in time via Settings settings icon. Tap the menu icon in the upper-left hand corner of your Home
tab > Select
Settings > Cycle Insights
You can toggle the entire Cycle Insights feature or just cycle phases off, which will pause the feature and remove it from your Home tab. Selecting Delete Data will disable the feature and delete the past data from your app.
Things to Keep in Mind
- Wear your ring on a consistent, 24/7 basis, and sync it to the app regularly, to help build a robust temperature data profile.
- Confirm the start date of your period each month by using the Log period start button via the home card or + button on the bottom right of the app. If you change the date of your period start, or log it retroactively, your cycle phases will update.
- As you continue to accumulate more temperature data by wearing your Oura Ring 24/7, and confirming or logging the exact start date of your period each month, your predictions will become more accurate.
- You need 60 nights of temperature data to display cycle phases. Without 60 days of data, you will only see your period prediction based on the calendar method.
- The calendar view in the Oura App will only show logged period dates and period prediction windows. It currently will not show cycle phase data.
- If you're currently taking a hormonal contraceptive or are pregnant, because your body's natural temperature variation is impacted as a result, Cycle Insights may not be able to accurately assess the timing of your period (if you still menstruate under these circumstances) or show your cycle phases. This is because regardless of the hormonal contraceptive being used, your cyclical variations, overall cycle length, and bleeding tendencies are all likely to deviate from your body's natural patterns.
- Medical factors such as infertility and fertility treatments, endometriosis, pregnancy, breastfeeding, overtraining, weight loss, stress, etc. can also have an impact on the key biosignals. If one, or any, of these apply to you, please know this may impact Oura’s ability to accurately and consistently predict your period and cycle phases each month.
- Only one period can be logged per calendar month, and data integrations from other period-tracking apps such as Apple Health or Clue are not currently available.
- The length of your menstrual flow (i.e., the number of bleeding days during your cycle) cannot currently be tracked by this feature. However, we hope to add this type of expansion in our next stages of development.
