Consumer wearables have become everyday tools for monitoring sleep and physical activity.
Researchers at the Centre for Sleep and Cognition at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) have now shown that their capabilities may extend further: pulse signals recorded overnight carry enough information to estimate vascular age, a key indicator of cardiovascular health.
The researchers analyzed photoplethysmography (PPG) signals, recorded overnight from the Oura Ring, a widely used consumer sleep tracker worn on the finger.
These passive nighttime recordings, collected while participants slept, were then used to estimate vascular age using both traditional feature-based methods and a deep learning model.
Importantly, ring-derived estimates were associated with blood pressure, a standard cardiovascular health marker.
Crucially, the team built and validated their own analytical pipeline rather than relying on proprietary algorithms inside the device.
This independence makes the findings more scientifically transparent and reproducible.
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