US defense agency awards Ouraring $97M for biometric sensor devices

The US Defense Health Agency (DHA) awarded a $96.1 million firm-fixed-price contract to Ouraring Inc. for its third-generation biometric sensor devices and services, explaining that, “as the Department of Defense (DOD) experiments with biometric devices to better track the health and wellness of personnel,” the contract will put Oura’s biometric “smart rings and services in the hands of service members.”

Oura’s Photoplethysmography (PPG) ring sensor continually collects data on over 20 biometrics. Oura says the sensors “are similar to those found in select hospital devices, which use them to monitor heart rate. The PPG system sends light through LEDs and receives it with a photodiode that captures how pulses of light through your arteries reflect your heart’s activity.”

The company says its sensor rings “samples 250 times per second and is 99.9 percent reliable compared to a medical-grade electrocardiogram … Oura’s PPG system is designed to maximize … data quality by leveraging sensor placement and infrared light. Positioning LEDs on either side of your finger allows Oura to always measure your clearest signal, unlike watch wearables that have a single-sided light source.”

In addition to the biometric sensor rings, under the DHA contract Oura also will provide the Defense Health Agency’s Wellbeing Office with data analysis that includes monitoring of physiological stress, recovery, resilience, and wellbeing indicators; individualized biometric data visualization; aggregate wellbeing visualization for the agency; and content delivery of wellness-related insights and training.

Oura is to deliver “workforce wellbeing services including high-performance medicine, mindfulness training, leadership coaching, protective factors, and peer-to-peer support training.”

The company is to “provide its wellbeing services at military medical treatment facilities (130 subordinate entities) for delivery to the entire DHA workforce. This contract was awarded on a sole-source basis utilizing fiscal 2024 operations and maintenance funds, obligated at the time of award. The contract has a period of performance beginning on September 30, 2024, for a period of 12 months. The place of performance includes multiple military medical treatment facilities.”

“The DOD invests heavily in maintaining the readiness of its workforce to conduct essential missions. However, the risk of infectious disease, like COVID-19, has long been an unpredictable variable. With RATE, the DOD can use commercial wearables to noninvasively monitor a service member’s health and provide early alerts to potential infection before it spreads,” Jeff Schneider, program manager for the project, has said.

According to the paper, A Review on Wearable Photoplethysmography Sensors And Their Potential Future Applications In Health Care, published in the International Journal of Biosensors & Bioelectronics, “PPG is an uncomplicated and inexpensive optical measurement method” that has received “much interest from numerous researchers around the globe to extract further valuable information from the PPG signal in addition to heart rate estimation and pulse oxymetry readings. PPG signal’s second derivative wave contains important health-related information. Thus, analysis of this waveform can help researchers and clinicians to evaluate various cardiovascular-related diseases such as atherosclerosis and arterial stiffness. Moreover, investigating the second derivative wave of PPG signal can also assist in early detection and diagnosis of various cardiovascular illnesses that may possibly appear later in life. For early recognition and analysis of such illnesses, continuous and real-time monitoring is an important approach that has been enabled by the latest technological advances in sensor technology and wireless communications.”

Oura’s biometric ring has an individual price of $300 and up, and the accompanying app requires a nearly $100 yearly subscription to access much of the data and reports that it generates.

From June 23, 2020, through April 8, 2021, DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit used the Oura ring during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to deliver continuously updated scores of infection risk using an AI algorithm. Data were acquired from 9,381 DOD personnel wearing Oura and Garmin devices, totaling 599,174 user-days of service and 201 million hours of data.

According to the paper, Real-Time Infection Prediction with Wearable Physiological Monitoring and AI to Aid Military Workforce Readiness During COVID-19, published in Scientific Reports, increased risk scores were detected “as early as 6 days prior to diagnostic testing (2.3 days average).” The study demonstrated the “feasibility of a real-time risk prediction score to minimize workforce impacts of infection.”

The authors of the paper who conducted the study said, “This approach could deliver a powerful new practical tool to combat global threats to workforce readiness from infectious diseases.”

The “study utilized multiple commercially off-the-shelf wearable devices to deliver a real-time service for inference of infection risk with US military personnel working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this effort was to rapidly operationalize the Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure algorithm which was originally developed … under a Defense Threat Reduction Agency and Defense Innovation Unit-sponsored program predict hospital-acquired infection.”

Beginning in December 2023, the US Air Force distributed Oura rings to more than 1,000 graduates of the First Sergeant Academy to track their health and wellness, and in 2021, the US Navy distributed 300 of the rings to sailors and Marines onboard the amphibious assault ship Essex to study fatigue.

Article Topics

biometric sensors  |  biometrics  |  Department of Defense  |  Oura  |  U.S. Government  |  wearables