SAN FRANCISCO and LAS VEGAS — September 15, 2020 — Oura Health, the company behind the smart ring that provides personalized insights on sleep and overall health, today announced a partnership with UFCÒ, 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 InstituteÒ, 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 help 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.
About Oura Health:
Oura Health is the company behind the smart ring providing actionable insights on sleep and its impact on overall health. The ring tracks all stages of sleep and accounts for daily activity to provide practical steps for long term improvement. Founded in 2013, Oura is now used by top performers including Jack Dorsey, Michael Dell, Arianna Huffington, Marc Benioff, the NBA and more. Oura Health is headquartered in Oulu, Finland, with offices in Helsinki and San Francisco. Oura has raised a total of $47M of funding from Forerunner Ventures, MSD Capital, Gradient Ventures, and Square. For more information, please visit http://ouraring.com/.
About UFC:
UFC® is the world’s premier mixed martial arts (MMA) organization, with more than 318 million fans and 102 million social media followers. The organization produces more than 40 live events annually in some of the most prestigious arenas around the world, while broadcasting to nearly one billion TV households across more than 175 countries. UFC’s athlete roster features the world’s best MMA athletes, representing more than 65 countries. The organization’s digital offerings include UFC FIGHT PASS®, the world’s leading streaming service for combat sports. UFC was acquired in 2016 by global entertainment, sports and content company Endeavor and strategic investors Silver Lake Partners and KKR. UFC is headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada. For more information, visit UFC.com and follow UFC at Facebook.com/UFC, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram: @UFC.
