September 28, 20264:42 AM ET

The leading smart ring manufacturer is betting its trove of health data will be a hit with Wall Street.

Transcript

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Oura plans to become a publicly traded company this week. It makes rings that track users' health data. And the company is expected to be one of this year's biggest IPOs, raising more than $2 billion. NPR's Alina Selyukh reports.

ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: In recent years, smartwatches have been losing ground to smart rings, as people who want to track their sleep, steps or stress are looking for devices that are lighter, more discreet and screen-free. And Oura - founded in Finland 13 years ago - has run circles around its rivals. Its minimalist rings show up on the hands of celebrities like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and the hottest American tennis star.

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AUTOMATED VOICE: Will Coco Gauff please report to the U.S. Open?

SELYUKH: This is from Oura's most recent ad campaign. Oura says its users have doubled for two years straight. And the median for how much people wear its tracking ring is 23 hours a day. Forrester research analyst Arielle Trzcinski says the brand has cracked the code on how to get its sensors on people's fingers every waking hour and in bed.

ARIELLE TRZCINSKI: The fact that folks not only start wearing it and become paying members, but also that they wear it roughly five days a week, which is significant.

SELYUKH: The paying member part is also notable. Buying an Oura ring costs at least $350. But then if you actually want to use all your health data, there's a subscription fee of $6 a month. This helps make Oura reliably profitable.

TRZCINSKI: So it's as much about this hardware aspect as it is about the subscription model.

SELYUKH: Oura's pitch is that its rings can track more than 50 health metrics, including body temperature and heart rate. In its first financial disclosure earlier this month, the company said it had, quote, "amassed one of the largest biometric datasets in consumer health" with nearly 42 billion hours of physiological data on its users. This has critics raising concerns about data security and privacy. Also a class-action lawsuit has questioned the quality of Oura's sleep tracking, which the company disputes. And then there's a big picture question.

LUCY MCBRIDE: I think we run the risk of confusing data as a proxy for health.

SELYUKH: Lucy McBride is a primary care doctor in Washington, D.C., and author of a book called "Beyond The Prescription." She says she's seen benefits, like when a tracker alerted a patient to a heart condition. But...

MCBRIDE: I've also had patients who feel like they're at the mercy of these trackers. They feel like it's a bad boyfriend, like, judging them and shaming them and wanting them to do more.

SELYUKH: And she says it's not about the data itself, but about how we use it.

Alina Selyukh, NPR News.

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