Pentagon contracts for $96M in Oura smart rings, services
As the Department of Defense experiments with biometric devices to better track the health and wellness of personnel, it issued a $96 million award Tuesday to Finnish health technology company Oura to put its smart rings and services in the hands of service members.
While the department didn’t specify in the award announcement how many rings would be purchased under the firm-fixed-price contract — the rings retail for $299-$349 — it explains that the contract will also provide a suite of data analytics services the Pentagon’s health arm can use to take action on the biometric information generated by the devices.
“This contract is to provide the Defense Health Agency (DHA) Wellbeing Office delivery of Ouraring Inc., biometric sensor devices; data analysis including 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,” the award announcement says.
With those services, Oura will also “deliver workforce wellbeing services including high-performance medicine, mindfulness training, leadership coaching, protective factors, and peer-to-peer support training,” and “provide its wellbeing services at military medical treatment facilities (130 subordinate entities) for delivery to the entire DHA workforce. “
This isn’t the first time the DOD has used Oura rings. The department’s Defense Innovation Unit used the device, along with Garmin watches, during the COVID-19 pandemic for its Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure project, which paired the commercial biometric technology with an artificial intelligence algorithm to detect infectious diseases in advance of symptoms.
“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, said at the time.
Likewise, the Air Force last year distributed more than 1,000 Oura devices to graduates of the First Sergeant Academy. And, the Navy in 2021 gave out about 300 of the rings to sailors and Marines onboard amphibious assault ship Essex to study fatigue.
The new contract was awarded to Oura on a sole-source basis and runs through Sept. 30, 2025.
