Jeffrey Bland discusses how the Oura Ring 4 tracks immune responses, including early signs of infection and stress. He shares findings on wearables for detecting COVID-19 and monitoring immune system changes after vaccination.
Well, hi, Jeff Bland here. And as you know, I'm involved with Big Bold Health, and we're all about immunity. We're trying to understand with greater specificity how to personalize immunity, how to understand immunity. And I have a breakthrough to share with you that I think may be really interesting news to use to make this a little bit more real for you. And it comes back to something that I had discussed earlier in one of my previous podcasts or blog, spheres, and that had to do with the use of an Oura ring during the time that I got my Covid vaccination, my Moderna vaccine. And I noticed this really interesting change in my data from my Oura ring. So I started to really think about this and make this kind of a study over the last several months as to what really this is all about. So let me just give you a little bit of a tracing of history. So Oura ring. And by the way, I have no financial or corporate relationship with Oura Ring. This is just my own personal experience. But here is kind of my normal kind of fitness, what they call total score, that kind of puts together the principal things that are measured by the Oura ring. And you probably know, it measures your body temperature at night, it measures your pulse rate, it measures your heart rate variability, your sleep, your fitness for the day, and your respiration rate. So those are the kind of parameters of biometrics that are measured and they aggregate together into this score. This resilience score, which is on average for me is kind of in the middle 80s. Now. Why that's interesting is that when I got my first vaccine, I was, you know, felt fine. It didn't seem to create any major disturbance in my health. Didn't have any fever or anything of that nature. I had a sore arm. But. But when I got up in the morning, after I had my first night of sleep, having the vaccine, taking it at 11 in the morning, lo and behold, here was what my Oura ring told me. And I had never seen a number like this ever. This very low number of 57. And when I looked at why that was, it was because my body temperature went up, my respiration went up, my heart rate variability went down, and my sleep was disturbed. So even though I didn't feel sick, I really saw that I was being able to pick out what my immune system was doing to my overall health and metabolism. My immune system was sucking a huge amount of energy out of my body that was seen in this, in this data. Well, then my second Moderna vaccine, a lot of People said, well gee, I really had more symptoms, my second one than my first one. So I was all primed that I was going to really look at the effect on my immune system of the second one using MYA ring. But I was really surprised. On the second vaccine I didn't have any symptoms again and I didn't have the sleep disturbance, I didn't have the body temperature change, I didn't have the respiration change, I didn't have the heart rate variability change. So my total score was actually quite, quite good. So what did this tell me? It told me that this is an individual way of evaluating the impact on an immune system from a stressor because my response would be very different probably than somebody else. So I became very interested in this. And as I became interested, lo and behold, the literature started having papers. So Nature Medicine, a very well respected journal, had this article just recently published about biometric wearable devices and their relationship to early understanding of COVID 19. Because they're saying when you read this that you can detect early stage infection with a virus by your wearable device well before you would actually get the symptoms and have it diagnosed. That was kind of interesting in Nature Medicine. So then I really said, well gee whiz, this is a field that really deserves a lot more attention. This is a simple way for us to kind of track immune stress is using this aggregate of these variables, the different biometrics that are produced out of this device. So then I started looking and I found incredibly interesting papers published just in the last few months. This one is entitled Use of Physiological data from Wearable devices to identify SARS CoV2 infection and symptoms and predict whether you're going to get COVID 19 and if so, what severity might you have looking at the variability of your data set coming from your wearables? And here's a whole review of a book I just read. This was chapter eight of that book on wearable devices. And this was entitled wearable devices and COVID 19. State of the art framework and challenges talking about the value proposition of assessing immune function using these wearables as it relates to a viral infection. And then just to kind of make my story even more a little bit complete, this is a paper that was just published last week, a review of wearable and unobtrusive sensing technologies for chronic disease management in general, looking at effects on the immune system that track against many different disorders, inflammatory disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular problems. So what I'm saying is that the way that we use our wearable devices may actually be surrogate markers if we aggregate the data correctly into evaluating our immune system. Because remember that when your immune system is activated, it can use up almost 50% of your metabolic energy. That's really powerful, isn't it? And as it does so, it's putting a demand, it's putting a stressor on, on all of your functions to compensate. So things like your body temperature, respiration rate, your heart rate, variability, pulse rate, all of these things are reflective of that stress. So think that we have in our hands or on our wrists these tools that are actually giving us surrogate information about the status of our immune system. Pretty powerful and interesting. Stay tuned. We're going to be talking about this in much more detail.
