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Tracking Your Health Smarter: How CGMs and Oura Rings Work Together
Tracking your health has come a long way from just counting steps or calories. Today, wearable technology makes it possible to see how your sleep, stress, movement, and meals impact your body in real-time. One of the most effective ways to do this is by combining two powerful tools: continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and the Oura Ring.
ARA Integrative and Functional Medicine in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, board-certified internal and integrative medicine specialist Rina Kapoor, MD, and her team help patients use data-driven insights to better understand their bodies, improve energy, and prevent disease. Here’s how CGMs and Oura Rings work, and why pairing them can take your health tracking to the next level.
Understanding continuous glucose monitors (CGMs)
A continuous glucose monitor, or CGM, is a small wearable device that tracks your blood sugar (glucose) levels in real-time. The sensor sits just under the skin and sends glucose readings to your phone every few minutes, giving you continuous insight into how your body responds throughout the day.
CGMs help you:
- See how food choices, sleep, stress, and exercise affect your glucose
- Identify patterns that may signal insulin resistance or energy crashes
- Make data-driven changes to support steady energy and better metabolic health
For patients focused on optimizing wellness — not just managing diabetes — CGMs are a valuable tool to analyze health using wearable technology.
What the Oura Ring measures
The Oura Ring is another advanced wearable designed to track key health metrics, including:
- Sleep quality and stages
- Heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV)
- Body temperature trends
- Activity and recovery balance
These metrics help you understand how your lifestyle choices impact recovery, stress levels, and overall metabolic function.
Oura’s strength lies in showing how your body performs over time, revealing the connection between your rest, activity, and resilience.
How CGMs and Oura Rings work together
Pairing CGMs with Oura Rings offers a comprehensive view of your health by combining internal glucose data with recovery and sleep trends. Oura recently partnered with leading CGM platforms like Dexcom to allow your glucose readings to integrate directly into the Oura app.
Together, these wearable devices help you uncover relationships such as:
- How poor sleep impacts your fasting glucose the next morning
- Whether stress or overtraining leads to higher blood sugar levels
- How meal timing and activity affect your glucose stability
By analyzing these patterns, you can see how your body truly responds to daily habits, turning wearable data into meaningful insights for better health decisions.
The benefits of analyzing health data from wearables
Understanding your own data empowers you to take control of your health. Combining insights from CGMs and Oura Rings allows you to:
- Optimize nutrition and meal timing
- Improve sleep and recovery
- Reduce stress-related glucose spikes
- Track progress toward better metabolic health
Wearable technology doesn’t replace medical advice, but it can be a powerful tool to support a personalized, preventive approach to wellness.
Empowering your health journey
ARA Integrative and Functional Medicine, our integrative care team helps patients interpret data from CGMs, Oura Rings, and other wearable health tracking devices to create custom health plans. We make the data meaningful, turning insights into sustainable lifestyle improvements.
When used together, CGMs and Oura Rings don’t just track numbers; they reveal how your body truly functions. By understanding these patterns, you can take smarter steps toward balanced energy, improved sleep, and long-term metabolic wellness.
Request an appointment online or call our Philadelphia-area office at 610-358-3300 today to learn how to integrate wearable health technology into your personalized care plan.
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