One ring to rule them all

The latest health tech trend in South Africa isn’t about steps or calories; it’s about how well you sleep, and who gets to see that data.

The Oura Ring, considered to be one of the most accurate sleep trackers, has finally arrived locally, but not in the way you’d expect.

Instead of retail stores, you can only get it through Discovery Health. And next year, Discovery Vitality reward members will earn points not just for high intensity workouts or Park Runs, but for sleep. Discovery claims it is the first health insurer in the world to reward you for sleeping. On the surface, it’s a dream come true: a global best-in-class wearable, localised through a programme that’s already incentivised healthier living for millions of South Africans.

The first-generation Oura Ring was launched a decade ago, and it’s been a quiet giant in the global wellness market, worn by everyone from biohackers to A-listers.

What makes it so appealing is its form factor and accuracy: a discreet titanium band that tracks sleep, heart rate, activity and recovery without lighting up your wrist like a Christmas tree.

Its sensors can also measure blood oxygen and temperature, while the app translates it into actionable insights, not just numbers.

It doesn’t just tell you how long you slept for, but how you slept, when your temperature spiked and insights for each sleep stage. It provides a daily Readiness Score – your mental and physical readiness for the day – and a list of what metrics contributed to it.

Now that I’m wearing one, I understand the hype. It’s comfortable and offers a level of sleep granularity that smartwatches struggle to match.

But here’s where things get complicated. Because it’s available through Discovery Health, it means your sleep data, or at least the interpretation of it, becomes part of a broader ecosystem that includes your medical aid, car insurance, and banking behaviour.

Not only has Discovery built an empire around incentivised health and performance, but also a data ecosystem that connects every aspect of your life: from how fast you drive, to medical claims, and soon, how long you sleep.

South Africans may be wary of a system that may eventually penalise you for what it currently rewards. If Discovery can offer cheaper premiums to good drivers, could it one day do the same for good sleepers, or worse, penalise the insomniacs?

The company insists Vitality Sleep Rewards next year will encourage better habits, not punishment. But it’s hard to ignore the growing sense that Discovery isn’t just helping us live better; it’s learning how we live, in extraordinary detail.

Even among wearables, data discrepancies are worth mentioning. With the Oura Ring, Apple Watch and Galaxy Ring, I noticed differences in metrics for sleep, step count and calories.

The Oura is more generous with calories, while the Apple Watch is similar even with step count, but the Galaxy Ring was consistently off compared to the two. And each device reads sleep data uniquely; it’s the nature of proprietary algorithms interpreting biometric data differently.

Discovery will also accept sleep data through smartwatches from Apple, Garmin and Samsung, but when your insurer’s rewards depend on those metrics, the small differences start to matter.

That said, Discovery’s move to link Vitality Rewards to sleep isn’t just a clever incentive, it’s a reflection of a global shift. Sleep has become the new wellness currency.

The real question, though, is who benefits most from our sleep? The person, or the systems that record it? The issue lies in what happens when the insights it provides stop being personal and start becoming policy.

As consumers, we’ve become comfortable trading data for discounts. If the goal is truly better sleep, that’s a win.

But if the goal is to further intertwine our biometric, financial, and behavioural data under one corporate umbrella, then we’re inching towards a future where privacy sleeps light.

Discovery might be rewarding us for rest, but when sleep becomes data, privacy turns into profit.

Originally published on Brainstorm: https://brainstorm.itweb.co.za/article/one-ring-to-rule-them-all/JN1gP7OA9olqjL6m