I just discovered these 5 hidden Oura Ring features — and you need to know about them

1. Automatic housework tracking

Bear with me, because there's a reason I think this is cool.

All movement accumulated throughout the day contributes to your health data and overall energy expenditure (read about NEAT). If you have movement goals set up on your ring, any activity will help you hit those targets, as well as boost active calorie burn, including your housework.

Your Oura Ring can automatically detect housework using its Auto Activity Detection feature (AAD), which tracks 24/7 — plus you'll log activities like running, workouts, or walking. Even without manually adding activity via the app, you’ll get credit for “brisk” housework activity.

Oura likes to think I'm constantly doing housework during the day (I'm not, I can assure you) and auto-detects this often, increasing my total activity score, so it can be inaccurate, but you can edit the activity manually and even change the activity type if it is incorrect.

The feature applies to both Android and iOS and any model, as long as you have an active membership. Activities are picked up after 10 minutes and will show as a card at the top of the app’s home screen. You can manually edit the type, duration, time, heart rate and calorie burn, or dismiss the activity altogether.

The more activities you confirm over time, the more accurate the details of detected workouts become; it’s worth it, as this contributes to activity and readiness scores.

2. Airplane Mode

Oura Ring's Airplane Mode prevents Bluetooth syncing to save your battery power. But the best bit is that the ring will still collect and store data for up to one week. You must have a charger for this mode, or you cannot use it.

Oura says the airplane mode is a great option for traveling between time zones during a short stay, when you don’t want this to be accounted for. You can activate the mode for up to seven days at a time, and to use it for longer, re-enable it by removing your ring from its charger and following the steps below.

3. Find My Ring

Lost your Oura Ring? No problem. Oura’s Find My Ring feature can help you locate it. This feature is available for Gen3 and Oura Ring 4 users with an active membership using iOS or Android.

This feature can be toggled on for low power mode, but it may not show if you haven’t enabled this setting before misplacing the ring.

4. Widgets

Oura widgets allow you to add data like readiness, sleep and activities to your lock and home screens for easy viewing. You can add iOS widgets using any generation ring and customize them on the fly with a simple press and hold.

For widgets to update, you must open the Oura app and sync for the latest data.

5. Tagging

Tagging activities and symptoms (read: symptom radar) contextualizes the Oura experience and can help you unlock health trends related to your fitness or sleep. It can feel time-consuming at first, but it helps to pull trends over time using the Trends view in your home menu if you can manage to form a habit of doing it.

This simply involves selecting a tag to apply to your sleep or other activities and can be done following the steps below. There are so many to choose from, you won't be disappointed.

I like to add the alcohol tag to my sleep whenever I have had a drink or two late in the evening, and I do the same for a late meal. I know that both will impact my sleep data and overall sleep score, so adding this will allow me to see the difference between consuming food and alcohol late at night versus not over the months and years.

It’s well worth diving into the Trends via the three lines on your homepage. From here, you can select and deselect various data points to look at your long-term health and sleep habits and how they impact your longevity.