Episode summary
Wearables for Women | Bloomberg Businessweek
Bloomberg Businessweek Daily
· · 6 min · Hosts: Carol Massar, Tim Stenovec · Guests: Holly Shelton
Summary
Holly Shelton said Oura is using AI to turn its smart ring from a passive tracker into a proactive health companion. She argued that wearables now combine continuous biometric sensing with machine learning and LLMs to translate data into daily, conversational guidance, rather than alerts that interrupt users.
Shelton also described Oura’s design philosophy as “quiet technology”: a product that is comfortable, accurate, has long battery life, and stays out of the user’s way. She said the goal is to connect people back to themselves without making the device noisy or attention-seeking.
On women’s health, Shelton said most health technology and research has historically underserved women and too often reduced women’s health to reproductive issues. She said Oura starts product work by deeply understanding women’s bodies, then extends insights across the full cycle, including period onset, contraception, pregnancy, and perimenopause, so sleep and readiness scores are interpreted in context.
Key takeaways
- Holly Shelton said AI is making Oura’s ring a “proactive health companion,” not just a tracker.
- Shelton said Oura’s “quiet technology” approach favors comfort, accuracy, long battery life, and minimal interruption.
- She said women’s health products should be built around female physiology at every phase of the reproductive cycle.
- Shelton said Oura’s features cover period onset, contraception, pregnancy, and perimenopause, with insights tailored to cycle context.
Notable quotes
“this is the first time where we've had these products, you've got this aura ring that's on you 247 continuously measuring you”
“We think a lot about what we internally call quiet technology”
“this is a a a group of people who have been underressearched, uh, underfunded, often kind of reduced to to reproductive health”
“we understand exactly where you are in your cycle, if you're in your ludial phase or your follicular phase, if you're pregnant”
“we're working on some really exciting things, so stay tuned”
How the episode opens
Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts, radio, news. — You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenc on Bloomberg Radio. — It is time now for Business Week's Women's Health segment. We do focus on key issues and developing technologies impacting the present and future of women's health around the world. It's not always easy when we are seeing images like that and just reminded that there's a lot of stress around the country and really around the world.
We welcome Hi Shelton, chief product officer at Aura Health. She joins us from San Francisco. She was former global product lead for MacBook Pro at Apple.
Before that, she served as CEO and co-founder of Move With. It's a fitness and wellness platform connecting people to guided fitness and meditation classes. It ultimately was sold to Under Armour Connected Fitness.
Good to have you on the program. We talk about technology and and health care converging and especially with consumer products that increasingly offer things that we used to only be able to get in a clinical or or medical environment. How do you view the layering of AI onto this data in order to deliver actionable results to people?
Yeah. Hi, first thanks thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Um when when we think about wearables today, uh th this is the first time where we've had these products, you've got this aura ring that's on you 247 continuously measuring you. And so the way that we think about how AI is adding on to this is twofold. One, providing that that deep machine learning, the detection, the prediction, the understanding that allows us to translate these signals into something that we can understand and act on every day.
And the second is through uh all the new LLM capabilities that allow us to take and extend that translation into a conversation to help make health a daily practice something something that we incorporate into our everyday as a back and forth conversation.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- wearable health tech for women
- oura smart rings
- ai hand gesture control
- biometric data
- health product design
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Oura
- Doublepoint Technologies Oy
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Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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