I use the Oura ring [1] for sleep tracking, it's by far the best I know of for sleep. The fact that it's a ring is convenient for comfort, and very precise as it adheres well to the finger even during night movements.
At such a price (more than my Apple Watch) I expect all the analysis to be done on the phone.
But small specialized shops like Oura can't fund constant R&D on hardware dev and sleep tracking algorithms, infrastructure, plus continuous SW patches & updates to existing customers and products, without subscriptions, because they lack Apple's other revenue streams and muscle to negociate steep discounts on HW and cloud infra, so the one-time sale fee of Oura's HW product is not enough to cover all those on-going dev costs and keep the company afloat.
Not an Oura customer or shareholder, just though I'd share some light on the costs and challenges of competing in this space. It just doesn't work without continuous subscription based revenue streams. Low margins on HW sales are not enough to fund such businesses.
Software app subs are one thing, but hardware is something else, IMO.
> research-grade sensors
Are these people really this shallow? What does that even mean