Exclusive: Oura's AI plan keeps health data local — and private
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Oura is planning to deliver health insights to its customers using AI that runs locally on the smartphones of owners of its smart rings.
Why it matters: By running its models on the phone rather than relying on a cloud-based service, Oura CEO Tom Hale tells Axios it can better protect customers' privacy.
Driving the news: Oura is working with Austin-based WebAI to power the new AI features.
- Oura's AI services will roll out slowly over the coming weeks and months, Hale said, starting with a cloud-based adviser that had already been in testing. That will be followed by the locally run algorithms, which will work on both iOS and Android devices.
- Hale said the company doesn't have a specific timeline for the new AI features but added that Oura may start with women's health features, given sensitivity over that data.
Zoom in: In a demo for Axios, Oura and WebAI showed a chatbot offering advice to various hypothetical customers, including a marathon runner looking to improve their recovery and a shift worker struggling to understand their circadian rhythms.
- Hale said that Oura's vision is that everyone will use a device like its ring to collect personal health data. Then, some form of machine intelligence can look over that data, make recommendations and — someday — even offer diagnoses and suggest care options.
But personal health data is especially sensitive, he said — hence the importance of keeping both the data and the analyzing algorithms running on a customer's own device.
- "All that knowledge you have of someone's life needs to be secure, needs to be private, needs to be under the control and agency of the person about whom that data is being collected," Hale said. "We think really the only way to do that is on the edge."
The big picture: Running AI on-device (in this case, Oura's phone app, not the tiny ring itself) as opposed to remotely on cloud-based computers can have a number of benefits beyond privacy: It's also often cheaper and faster.
This year is expected to see a flurry of activity in the area.
- Apple already runs some of its Apple Intelligence algorithms on-device, as does Microsoft in its Copilot+ PCs.
- Qualcomm has also promised more AI algorithms will soon run on smartphones using its chips.
- Microsoft recently enabled algorithms developed by China's DeepSeek to run locally on Copilot+ PCs.
