Smart ring maker Oura was hit Thursday with a proposed class action lawsuit alleging it misled customers about how accurately its $500 ring tracks sleep.
Clarkson Law Firm filed the suit on behalf of Madison Surber, a California woman who says she paid roughly $514 for an Oura Ring 4 in May 2025. The complaint alleges the ring lacks any sensor capable of picking up the biological signals that define sleep stages, and that Oura instead runs the wearer’s heart rate, movement and skin temperature through a machine-learning model that produces an estimate — one with what the filing calls “a coin flip’s chance of being correct.”
Complaints about the ring’s sleep readings have circulated among owners for years, and the filing leans on them. It reproduces screenshots of complaints pulled from a Facebook owners’ group and the Oura subreddit, including users who describe waking up exhausted and then being handed a high score by the app.
Oura told USA Today it rejects the claims. “We dispute the allegations in this complaint and intend to defend against them,” the company said. Oura did not immediately respond to the Daily Wire’s request for comment.
According to the complaint, Oura marketed its rings, priced at $300 and higher, as able to do what only a hospital sleep lab can do: identify the four different stages of sleep.
Oura’s marketing has described the ring as “[b]uilt for accuracy” and promised “Unparalleled Accuracy,” according to the filing, which cites the company’s product pages and blog. The complaint says Oura has advertised 79% agreement with polysomnography — the overnight lab study that is the clinical benchmark — in sorting wake, light, deep and REM sleep, and more recently has promoted “95% Sleep Staging Accuracy compared to clinical sleep lab” on the Oura Ring 5 product page.
The suit argues the hardware makes the promise impossible to keep. “Sleep happens in the brain, not on one’s finger,” the complaint states. Sleep staging is defined by brain wave activity, eye movement, and muscle tone, it argues, signals captured through scalp electrodes and leads placed near the eyes and chin — none of which fit on a ring.
Ryan Clarkson, co-founder and managing partner at Clarkson Law Firm, said in a statement: “When people rely on a device to guide decisions about their health, misinformation cannot be tolerated. Oura users trust that the numbers on their screen reflect reality.
“People structure their days, interpret the way they feel, and design their lives around inaccurate figures spit out by these devices. Marketing an inaccurate sleep tracker as precise and reliable is dangerous because people believe it — and change their behavior accordingly.”
The complaint asks the court to order Oura to stop advertising capabilities the firm says the rings do not deliver, to prevent further alleged misrepresentations, and to provide restitution to customers who bought the products based on those claims.
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