The NBA will be rigorously testing players within the Orlando bubble as the season restarts, but the league will not be without help as it seeks to identify players who are sick or especially vulnerable to COVID-19. The league and the NBPA have teamed up with Oura, a wearable technology company, to provide players with a ring that monitors their sleep, heart rate and temperature. On the most recent episode of “SBJ Unpacks: The Road Ahead,” Oura CEO Harpreet Singh Rai joins our Andrew Levin to discuss the company's advanced technology ring and how the NBA will utilize it to prevent a virus outbreak inside the Orlando bubble.
On how effective the Oura Ring is at detecting COVID-19 symptoms:
Singh Rai: We do see changes up to two or three days in advance. Obviously, a lot more data needs to be done, and it needs to be done with independent universities with significant populations. … A lot more research is needed, but this actually happened because of our users. One of our users, he’s a pretty avid athlete. He’s an entrepreneur, but he has awesome HRV (heart rate variability) and a really low resting heart rate, and he came forward and wrote a post on Facebook. … He said, ‘I woke up one day and my readiness score was a 54. I’ve had this device for over a year and my readiness score was always in the 80s and 90s.' He didn’t feel any symptoms. He described himself as asymptomatic at the time. He decided to go get a test because he saw in the data he had a slightly elevated fever. … He went and got a test and turned out to be positive.
On working with the NBPA to ensure health data gets to teams without players being tracked:
Singh Rai: Player data, and frankly all people’s data, is really important. Us as a company, we’re a GDPR company because we started in Europe. It’s even more stringent than HIPAA, but here if the data is misused potentially it could have big implications. Wearables have had a hard time navigating themselves through athletes and even the corporate workplace because of data privacy reasons. The PA, the NBA and us thought really carefully an innovatively about how we could come up with a way to do this. … That data could be misused, and it’s off the court. It belongs to the players. What we thought through is, if those are the scenarios, how do we get rid of the scenarios. The first one was don’t actually share the data with the teams. Go right to the PA and the NBA with the data, and then separately how do we make sure we’re not giving away individual metrics that can perhaps ding a player or a staff member, so what we created was a risk score. That was aggregated. We look at … temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate and heart rate variability. We package that up into a risk score … this is passed on to the PA and the NBA.
On the risk score threshold where teams should be concerned:
Singh Rai: We have really focused more on how can you be safe, not does someone likely have an illness or not. … What we’ve created in our health risk management platform is the ability to actually look at a percentage of population that may have higher risk than the rest. You can actually just sort by who has the top 1 percent of risk today within our group based on this data. This communication is actually really, really important. It doesn’t say you have COVID. Then people may not want to wear this ring at all. The broader implications of this are how can we actually distribute tests in a more informed manner and a more economic manner. Now, the NBA can afford to test every day, but most businesses and most other sports leagues can’t. If you think about the cost of a test, $100 a test right now in this country, and if you’re testing every day that ends up being roughly $3000 a month or over $30k a year. Most companies and sports leagues can’t do that, so how can we actually distribute these tests if they’re limited and expensive in a more informed manner instead of not being able to test as frequently as we want? That's really how we're looking at it.
