E-Paper
Sign In
The quiet health revolution happening on your finger
From sleep quality to stress and recovery, Oura’s Tom Hale says wearables are making prevention smarter, simpler, and more personal.
- PUBLISHED: Thu 22 Jan 2026, 1:16 PM UPDATED: Fri 23 Jan 2026, 12:14 AM
- By:
- Nasreen Abdulla
- Share:
For years, the future of health was imagined as a dramatic occurrence involving full-body scans by futuristic machines, miracle supplements developed in labs or cutting-edge procedures that were only available to wealthy people. However, experts say the future of healthcare is already here.
According to Tom Hale, CEO of Oura, the future of health is longevity. It lives in small, daily behaviours, measured continuously, interpreted intelligently, and nudged gently in the right direction by smart wearables. At the centre of this is a simple idea — prevention is more powerful than treatment. The data needed to enable this prevention is already flowing from devices worn by a large majority of people.
Recommended For You
We caught up with Hale while he was on a visit to the UAE to meet health officials in the country in December 2025. In a candid conversation, he discussed smart wearables and how the UAE is turning into the eye of the storm for the movement to use data to ensure longevity.
The UAE market
The company launched in the UAE in early 2025 are selling their products through select retail channels, including Virgin Megastore and airport outlets. According to Hale, this is an “exciting place” to be in and the company is exploring some partnerships. “This market and the whole region is an exciting place because there’s a lot of innovation happening,” he said. He added that he was in the UAE after being invited through a partnership aimed at exploring how wearables and AI can support predictive and preventive healthcare. The visit involved meetings with the Ministry of Health and research institutes.
He said there were several notable trends in the UAE that stood out. “Members in the region have really good sleep quality but very short durations,” he said. “It is, in fact, amongst one of the worst slept countries. The worst are Asian countries like Korea and Japan. Countries in the GCC are the second worst. I think it’s because of the late evening culture. Maybe it has to do with doing business with other parts of the globe in different time zones. I think there’s a strong work ethic here and a lot of digital work that happens.”
He added that the increasing amount of travel in the region was also negatively impacting the health of Oura wearers. “Travel is very disruptive to the health,” he said. “So, with all these factors, there is a very rapid adoption among people here. They are wearing their Piaget watch or their Rolex and they don’t want a wearable that is flashing or asking for attention. They want something more discreet and comfortable.”
UAE’s sleep score
In a sleep report published by the company in January, the UAE was described as a “nation of night owls” who have one of the world’s late-to-bed, late-to-rise sleep habits. The average sleep window of the country extends from 12:06 am to 7:57 am. The UAE has the highest share of late-evening chronotypes globally at 6.67 per cent, compared with a 3 per cent
worldwide average.
People in the country average 6.85 hours of sleep a night, just under the global 7.1 hour norm, but still deliver standout sleep quality. The averaging sleep efficiency score — the time in bed spent actually sleeping — stands at an impressive 85.7 per cent.
Women in the UAE sleep longer than men — averaging 7.07 hours versus the 6.59 hours of men — and show stronger sleep-efficiency and REM consistency. This mirrors global sleep trends where women typically demonstrate more stable recovery behaviours.
The longevity equation
Hale said that unlike many wearables that focus on steps, workouts, or calorie burn, Oura takes a broader view of health — one rooted in longevity. “Longevity isn’t about supplements or cold plunges,” Hale says. “It’s about sleep, nutrition, movement, stress, and social connection. These are the most heavily weighted variables in how long and how well you live.”
He said that the wearables play a crucial role because they make the invisible visible. “The existing healthcare systems tend to treat illnesses, which is incredible,” he said. “However, avoiding illness is very important. Everyone should have a device that’s measuring clinical grade continuous data about what’s going on in their body, understanding what is normal for them. Steer people towards healthier behaviours.”
Hale added that metrics like heart rate variability, nighttime temperature changes, and respiration trends offer insight into stress, recovery, immune response, and metabolic health — often before symptoms appear. This enables three powerful shifts: prevention, prediction, and personalisation. He said that the prediction by Oura in terms of women’s health has been a game changer for many as the ring is able to predict a woman’s cycle to half a day’s accuracy. “I have had so many women say that the Oura helped them get pregnant,” he said. “They say that they were struggling to get pregnant and the device showed them when the fertile window is, helping them to get pregnant.”
Locally, Oura has partnered with GluCare in a pilot project to pick up diabetic kidney disease up to two years earlier than today’s standard tests. The programme will provide continuous and actionable insights into patient health by leveraging digital biomarkers, such as sleep, stress, physical activity, and glucose levels.
The sleep secrets
Hale’s own journey with Oura began as a client. He was going through a stressful time in his life as a business owner in 2021 and was losing sleep when he decided to get the ring. “About four to six weeks after I put it on, it actually changed my behaviour,” he said. “I stopped drinking coffee in the morning. I turned the temperature down. I began using an eye mask and earplugs. I did all these things that were very simple and straightforward, and I saw the results show up in my data immediately but also maybe more importantly I felt totally different.”
He said that the ring helped him realise that he had been sleep deprived for years, while raising kids and working on his career. “Once I got my sleep under control, I decided that I wanted to be involved in this company,” he said. According to Hale, the company’s revenue has gone from $100 million four years ago to over a billion dollars in 2025.
He added that the company achieved the ballooning sales figure by focusing on certain factors. One was focusing on women. “The existing set of wearables aren’t really designed for women from a feature and functionality standpoint,” he said. He explained how women didn’t want to wear something clunky and big and the Oura ring, which doubled as a jewellery, was a perfect fit for them.
The company’s partnership with Gucci helped them realise that people wanted to try on the rings. “What we learned from that experience was that as something that has the properties of jewellery people want to put it on and see it,” he said. “How does it look against my skin? Do I like the shape of it? Does it look good? So, we stepped into retail and that was a
huge unlock.”
