Oura Named Official Health Wearable of UFC Performance Institute
Oura selected to help UFC athletes better understand their health, optimize their training programs, and prioritize privacy and safety
Oura Health, the company behind the smart ring that provides personalized insights on sleep and overall health, today announced a partnership with UFC®, the world’s premier mixed martial arts organization, to provide Oura Rings and health management services to fighters and staff to prioritize health, safety, and privacy.
The staff of the UFC Performance Institute, the state-of-the-art, mixed martial arts training, research, and sports innovation performance facility, have spent three years vetting technology that can enhance athlete training programs to optimize physical and mental performance. After rigorous vetting, UFC has chosen Oura as its first-ever “Official Health Wearable” to equip athletes with the most accurate and credible health technology. Oura will play an essential role in enhancing the training programs for UFC athletes who opt to participate, prioritizing the impact that sleep has on mental clarity, reaction time, physical strain and recovery, injury avoidance, and immunity. Participating UFC athletes will use Oura’s long-standing Teams product, which allows members of a group to share their data with a “Coach” who can work with individuals to better understand their health or work with groups to identify meaningful patterns to better inform training regimens.
The Oura Ring is one of the only mainstream consumer health wearables that measures body temperature directly from your skin rather than estimating it from your external environment. Temperature is a vital component of accurate sleep analysis, athletic performance, and the ability to uncover potential signs of illness. Oura, alongside two major research institutions, has donated Oura Rings to thousands of frontline healthcare workers. Oura Rings have been used in TemPredict, a study at UCSF, and in a separate study at West Virginia University—contributing to a growing body of research on illness detection, symptom profiles, and recovery.
“The UFC Performance Institute is a visionary in its mission to utilize science and technology to keep athletes healthy and performing at their best," said Harpreet Singh Rai, Oura CEO. "We’re glad that we can support these efforts, especially in a time when safety is of the utmost importance. We’re excited about the ability to work with UFC in a collective commitment to prioritize athlete health.”
Added Duncan French, Vice President of Performance, UFC Performance Institute: “We are always looking for the right tools to help our athletes make better informed decisions about their training and recovery. The Oura Ring is a fantastic device that we’re excited about because it provides valuable insights into key biometrics that athletes can use to make adjustments to their training and overall competition preparedness. We’re looking forward to seeing the positive impact the Oura Ring will have with UFC athletes.”
With the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, this deployment of Oura's technology is even more timely given Oura's unique ability to potentially detect early COVID-19 symptoms to help keep the sport of MMA safe as UFC athletes continue to compete. The UFC will deploy Oura's Health Risk Management platform, which was developed as an opt-in solution to support organizations with existing health and safety protocols, such as UFC, to help keep athletes and training staff safe while protecting their privacy.
Oura will help UFC athletes make informed decisions with an efficient and accurate way of learning more about who may be in a higher risk category.
More information about the Oura Ring can be found online at ouraring.com.
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