Aura’s ring helps detect many cases of lymphoma, says its chief medical officer

The Aura Ring has become synonymous with smart rings like Kleenex has with tissues. With a 74% share of the category, according to Ommedia’s November 2025 report, it has helped define the overall health coverage category.

As someone who spent months on my Aura Ring data, I thought I had a pretty good handle on what it could do. But after sitting down with Aura’s first chief medical officer, Dr. Ricky Bloomfield, it turns out I left a lot on the table.

A former physician and Apple Health executive, Bloomfield joined Aura in 2025 to help develop how the company translates data into real-world health insights. And the fact that he showed up to our interview wearing multiple Aura rings proves that he really has his finger on the pulse of how tech is empowering health.

Our conversation led me to pull out the tools I pointed out, learn the real story behind my favorite feature and rethink what’s possible when it comes to tracking your health from your fingertips. Spoiler: It goes well beyond catching a cold early on.

Symptom Radar: The Best Axes for Coming Out of the COVID-19 Pandemic

One of my favorite AuraRing features is the Symptom Radar. Basically, it’s a vital dashboard of sorts that notifies you when one of them crosses your personal baseline, meaning it gives you a real indication that your body may be under stress before you even register it yourself.

“For a lot of people it’s like a check engine light in a car. Most of us aren’t experts in our cars — we might hear a funny sound, but seeing that light on the dashboard confirms, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do something about this,'” Bloomfield said.

My toxic trait is the belief that I can force illness out of existence by ignoring it, often empowering it to the point of collapse. Symptom Radar gave me the goal confirmation that I needed to allow myself a rest day and likely recover faster than if I just threw myself at the wall.

The onset of Symptom Radar, however, was anything but linear. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ora partnered with the University of California, San Francisco on a study called TemPredict, which tested whether ring data and daily symptom surveys could predict COVID-19 before symptoms appear, capturing its onset, progression and recovery.

It worked.

“What we found is that we can actually detect COVID 2.75 days earlier than someone would detect with a COVID test,” Bloomfield said.

That’s the kind of lead time that can change behavior, potentially stopping people from spreading the disease and encouraging them to seek treatment earlier.

But turning it into a consumer feature was complicated. Releasing a specific detection device for COVID-19 will require a lengthy FDA de novo approval process (potentially years) because there is nothing like it on the market at the time.

So they pivoted. Instead of a COVID detection feature, Aura has released Symptom Radar as a health tool that flags deviations from your basic lifestyle without pointing to a specific diagnosis. It was broad enough to avoid a regulatory hurdle, but useful enough for quick action and communication with your doctor.

When the check engine light goes to a serious place

What neither Aura nor its customers expected was that simple diversion notices would reach beyond cold and flu season.

“We’ve now seen many cases of lymphoma diagnosed with this,” Bloomfield said. “All four cases of lymphoma were young women with vague symptoms.”

Ring lymphoma was not found. But the recurring symptom radar alerts were the words that women needed to talk to their doctor and seek a diagnosis for whatever was ailing them.

“In all of these cases, they’ll eventually get to that diagnosis,” Bloomfield said. “But the bottom line here is that time is of the essence with something like lymphoma, a form of cancer, and the sooner you see and evaluate something like this, the better your chance of a positive outcome.”

And it’s not just lymphoma. Similar patterns began with appendicitis, where frequent symptom radar alerts prompted Aura Ring owners to seek care before their appendix burst (a serious complication if caught too late).

In other cases, the signals are less urgent but just as revealing. Some people have even seen patterns in their data that sent them to pregnancy before taking the test.

“Of course, we don’t have a feature that detects pregnancy, but they look at the data themselves, and they can draw these conclusions,” Bloomfield said. Bloomfield said.

Signal Radar 2.0

Context-specific notifications may be the next frontier for Aura, and the company has already laid the groundwork for it. Through Aura Labs (in the Aura app), Circle owners can opt into a clinical study focused on detecting high blood pressure. This shift from broad symptoms to more specific, clinically valid insights could be a preview of what a more targeted version of the symptom radar could be.

Unlike the current feature, however, such detection is carried over to the regulated area. “We have indicated publicly that our plan is to submit this feature to the FDA once we gather enough data,” Bloomfield said.

It’s the same way Apple has taken companies with features ECG and Alerts related to high blood pressure. Aura also conducts women’s health studies through Aura Labs, expanding its focus into the areas of cycle tracking and reproductive health.

Why the finger may know more than the wrist

After years of wearable testing, the idea of ​​a ring tracking the same metric from a small surface always gave me pause. In my mind: bigger sensor and bigger surface area equals more information. It turns out that bigger isn’t necessarily better, and location may be more important than size. According to Bloomfield, the finger is actually the best place for such biometric data.

“You have two arteries that run along the bottom of your finger, actually, called digital arteries … that make it a great place to measure physiological signals,” Bloomfield said.

The advantage of signal quality is especially evident at night, which is precisely when the ring gets its hold. Wrist-based wearables can be too large to comfortably wear to bed, and many still require overnight charging. The ring is enough for sleeping and with a seven-day battery life, there is no need to come to charge before bed.

“Because you’re not moving while you’re sleeping, you get a more accurate signal. You also get a more accurate temperature, which is important for a number of features, including our women’s health features, cycle tracking and fertility window prediction,” Bloomfield said.

Skin temperature fluctuates throughout the day as you move in and out of the house and add and remove layers such as gloves. But in a more controlled setting at night, this data is reliable enough to act on.

Bloomfield also confirmed that using the fingers only during sleep is a legitimate strategy. You’ll lose things like time-of-day stress tracking, automatic activity detection and scores that require continuous wear, but you’ll still capture your most data-rich windows.

The feature that you are actually dreaming of

Not one to leave potential health gains on the table, I asked Bloomfield which underutilized feature could have the biggest impact. His answer: the age of the heart.

“We had Aura staff who saw that the heart ages were 5 and 8 plus. And that was the motivation they needed to start exercising,” he said. “Once you change your behavior, and you start practicing consistently, you’ll see the value improve over time.”

According to Bloomfield, this feature measures pulse wave velocity: the speed at which your pulse travels through your major arteries, including your aorta, carotid and femoral arteries. This velocity is a proxy for arterial stiffness, which is related to overall heart health. Hardened arteries are usually a sign of old age. More elastic arteries mean the opposite.

I knew I had seen it before but couldn’t find it during our interview, which might explain why people seem to miss it. It lives under the My Health tab at the bottom of the app and requires at least 14 days (within the last 30) of data to unlock.

Mine turned out to be between 8.5 and 10 years younger than my actual age, which was a pleasant surprise. But beyond bragging rights, it’s a surprisingly accurate reflection of how active I was in a given week and a useful reference point for tracking positive changes.

The long game

The broader vision Bloomfield describes is a shift from reactive to proactive health care: a system where your ring helps you prevent disease and can flag something worth investigating before you have reason to call your doctor.

“We’re moving from a health care system where we see primarily reactive, ad hoc/fix-type care, to a world where we want to focus more on preventative and proactive care,” he said.

Making this vision accessible beyond people who can afford a $300 ring is something Aura is actively working on. The company has partnered with Essence Healthcare, a Medicare Advantage plan serving members in the Midwest, to provide the ring as a covered benefit at no cost to plan members.

“Insurance companies want their members to be healthy, which is one of those win-win situations. If members are healthy, health care costs are lower, and members benefit from being healthy.”

The partnership expanded after its first year in 2026 — a sign that insurance-backed wearables may not be far off.