The science

Your body is always giving you signals.

Most of them arrive while you are asleep, and none of them arrive in words. Aurora reads five of them through the night and answers with one line in the morning.

Buy AuroraExplore the technology
Aurora Ring, silver

How it works

From your finger to one sentence.

AURORA 01 BODY 02 SENSORS 03 SIGNALS 04 INSIGHTS
Hover a stage

01 — 04

A closed loop

Four stages, and the last one changes the first. What you do with the morning's answer is what the following night measures.

The hardware

Inside the ring.

No display, no button, nothing to press. Everything Aurora does happens on the inner face, against your finger, where you never see it.

Inside the ring.

—

Four parts

Tap a point on the ring. Only the first of the four is something anyone else will ever notice.

Annotations describe the components visible in this photograph. A full cutaway is in production.

What the ring actually measures

Raw signal, read as physiology.

Five measurements. Everything Aurora tells you is an interpretation of these and nothing else. Open any one to see what it is, how it is read, and what it cannot tell you.

Aurora is a general wellness product. It reports trends in sleep, activity and recovery. It is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition.

What it tells you

One screen, before the coffee.

Five readings, drawn from those five signals. Not a dashboard. An answer.

  1. 01

    Sleep, in stages

    A night is not one block. It is four stages cycling roughly every ninety minutes, and the balance between them is what decides whether eight hours in bed felt like eight hours of sleep.

    ≈90 minThe length of one sleep cycle

  2. 02

    Recovery, against your own baseline

    Heart-rate variability is a window onto the autonomic nervous system, the part of you that chooses between rest and readiness without being asked. As an absolute number it means very little. As a change from your own average it means a great deal.

    Your ownBaseline, never a population average

  3. 03

    The wakings you will not remember

    Brief arousals are a normal part of every night and almost none of them survive into memory. Counting them is the difference between saying you slept eight hours and knowing you were in bed for eight hours.

    0Of them you will recall in the morning

  4. 04

    Temperature, as an early signal

    Core body temperature falls as you fall asleep and climbs again before you wake. It is one of the clearest circadian rhythms in human physiology, which is exactly what makes a night that breaks the pattern worth knowing about.

    ≈0.5 °CThe nightly swing in core temperature

  5. 05

    Effort, counted honestly

    Movement is only load if it costs something. Deliberate effort is counted separately from ordinary activity, so a hard session and a long commute never arrive as the same number.

    3 axesOf motion, sampled continuously
Buy Aurora

The figures above describe general human physiology, not the measured performance of this device.

Further readingWhere this comes from.

None of the physiology on this page is Aurora's own research. It is standard, long-established and published, and these are the places to read it properly.

  1. 01 Heart rate variability: standards of measurement, physiological interpretation, and clinical useTask Force of the European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology · Circulation, 1996The reference document for how HRV is measured, and for what it does and does not indicate.
  2. 02 The AASM Manual for the Scoring of Sleep and Associated EventsAmerican Academy of Sleep MedicineThe clinical standard defining sleep stages and how they are scored.
  3. 03 The role and validity of actigraphy in sleep medicineA. Sadeh · Sleep Medicine ReviewsOn estimating sleep from movement alone, and the specific points at which that method fails.
  4. 04 Racial bias in pulse oximetry measurementSjoding et al. · New England Journal of Medicine, 2020Why this site states plainly that optical oxygen readings are affected by skin tone.
  5. 05 Circadian body temperature rhythm and the onset of sleepKräuchi and Wirz-JusticeOn the evening fall in body temperature and its role in initiating sleep.

References are given by title and author so they can be found and checked. Aurora has not conducted this research and does not present its findings as the measured performance of this product.

Understand the signals. Own the data.

Aurora measures every night, says one thing each morning, and asks nothing of you in between. One payment, and every reading belongs to you.

Buy Aurora