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Two Mental Health Xperience teams will each earn 15 Oura Rings. Here's how to be one of them.
July 27, 2026
Program Explainer
Oura donated $25,000 in hardware to xFoundry, and most of it is going to Mental Health Xperience teams. Two teams will each receive a fleet of fifteen Oura Ring 4 devices, with data access for the life of the hardware.
You enter by submitting an Oura Ring Use Plan with your Gate 2 deliverables, which are due August 16. Every active Mental Health Xperience team is eligible, at every participating university, and a plan is required in order to be considered.
What fifteen rings actually gets you
While one wearer gives you an anecdote, fifteen give you a signal you can build against. With fifteen people wearing rings across several months, you can watch sleep, heart rate variability, body temperature, and activity move within your users. When you change something in your solution, you can see whether those numbers respond, which means you can find out that an assumption was wrong in week three rather than at the final pitch. That's the difference between a team that believes its solution works and a team that can demonstrate it.
What to submit
Your Use Plan goes in with your Gate 2 deliverables. It serves as both your entry and the basis for selection, so it's worth working through carefully rather than putting together the night before the gate.
Cover five things:
- What you're testing. The variable or the hypothesis you're going after. Circadian rhythm, activity, diet, social interaction, or something nobody's tried.
- How you'll run it. Who wears the fifteen rings, for how long, and what you're measuring.
- How the data feeds your build. Which decisions change based on what you see. This is the one most teams underwrite, and it's what separates a plan from a wish list.
- How you'll handle consent and data. Informed, opt-in, and specific about what happens to what you collect.
- What you expect to find, and how you'll know whether it worked.
Winners are selected on the quality of these plans rather than on how far along your prototype is or how many users you already have. What matters is whether you've thought seriously about what fifteen wearers would let you learn.
Things to consider as you write your plan
Several of the following come from Oura's business terms rather than from us, and they shape what a workable plan looks like; it's worth reading through them before you start drafting.
Oura data cannot be used to train generative AI. This is a term in Oura's business agreement and there is no exception to it. If your solution includes a model that learns from user data, work out early where Oura data does and does not touch it, because discovering the conflict at the Deployment Gate would mean rebuilding.
Each ring belongs to one person. A membership is tied to a single wearer and can't be passed between people, so fifteen rings means fifteen individuals, and you'll need all of them identified before anything ships.
Wearers can stop sharing their data at any time, for any reason. You can frame the ring as something you're giving in exchange for their data, but just note that isn't enforceable and some people will step away partway through. Be ready just in case.
A few things to keep in mind. Reselling your allotted Oura rings, running a signup lottery, or keeping them for yourselves rather than your wearers is not allowed.
Reporting continues at every gate. Once your team has been awarded rings, each gate submission includes a short note on how you're using them and what you're learning.
If your team is selected
We collect ring sizes for all fifteen wearers and order per team. Local wearers pick up in person, and out-of-state wearers receive home delivery.
Each ring is tied to a personal Oura account, and teams work in the standard Oura app. Provided the rings are used as agreed, wearers keep them after the competition ends. xFoundry can request a ring back if it is mishandled or sitting unused, and we can't guarantee replacements for lost or damaged devices.
Start with the question, not the hardware
The strongest plans tend to be the ones that name a question worth answering and then explain why fifteen wearers is what it takes to answer it. If you can't yet finish the sentence "we'd know we were right if we saw ___," the plan probably isn't ready, and working out that question first will make most of the rest of it easier to write.
Consent templates, the full terms, and the administrative detail live in ConneXions: connexions.xfoundry.org.
Oura donated $25,000 in hardware to xFoundry, and most of it is going to Mental Health Xperience teams. Two teams will each receive a fleet of fifteen Oura Ring 4 devices, with data access for the life of the hardware.
You enter by submitting an Oura Ring Use Plan with your Gate 2 deliverables, which are due August 16. Every active Mental Health Xperience team is eligible, at every participating university, and a plan is required in order to be considered.
What fifteen rings actually gets you
While one wearer gives you an anecdote, fifteen give you a signal you can build against. With fifteen people wearing rings across several months, you can watch sleep, heart rate variability, body temperature, and activity move within your users. When you change something in your solution, you can see whether those numbers respond, which means you can find out that an assumption was wrong in week three rather than at the final pitch. That's the difference between a team that believes its solution works and a team that can demonstrate it.
What to submit
Your Use Plan goes in with your Gate 2 deliverables. It serves as both your entry and the basis for selection, so it's worth working through carefully rather than putting together the night before the gate.
Cover five things:
- What you're testing. The variable or the hypothesis you're going after. Circadian rhythm, activity, diet, social interaction, or something nobody's tried.
- How you'll run it. Who wears the fifteen rings, for how long, and what you're measuring.
- How the data feeds your build. Which decisions change based on what you see. This is the one most teams underwrite, and it's what separates a plan from a wish list.
- How you'll handle consent and data. Informed, opt-in, and specific about what happens to what you collect.
- What you expect to find, and how you'll know whether it worked.
Winners are selected on the quality of these plans rather than on how far along your prototype is or how many users you already have. What matters is whether you've thought seriously about what fifteen wearers would let you learn.
Things to consider as you write your plan
Several of the following come from Oura's business terms rather than from us, and they shape what a workable plan looks like; it's worth reading through them before you start drafting.
Oura data cannot be used to train generative AI. This is a term in Oura's business agreement and there is no exception to it. If your solution includes a model that learns from user data, work out early where Oura data does and does not touch it, because discovering the conflict at the Deployment Gate would mean rebuilding.
Each ring belongs to one person. A membership is tied to a single wearer and can't be passed between people, so fifteen rings means fifteen individuals, and you'll need all of them identified before anything ships.
Wearers can stop sharing their data at any time, for any reason. You can frame the ring as something you're giving in exchange for their data, but just note that isn't enforceable and some people will step away partway through. Be ready just in case.
A few things to keep in mind. Reselling your allotted Oura rings, running a signup lottery, or keeping them for yourselves rather than your wearers is not allowed.
Reporting continues at every gate. Once your team has been awarded rings, each gate submission includes a short note on how you're using them and what you're learning.
If your team is selected
We collect ring sizes for all fifteen wearers and order per team. Local wearers pick up in person, and out-of-state wearers receive home delivery.
Each ring is tied to a personal Oura account, and teams work in the standard Oura app. Provided the rings are used as agreed, wearers keep them after the competition ends. xFoundry can request a ring back if it is mishandled or sitting unused, and we can't guarantee replacements for lost or damaged devices.
Start with the question, not the hardware
The strongest plans tend to be the ones that name a question worth answering and then explain why fifteen wearers is what it takes to answer it. If you can't yet finish the sentence "we'd know we were right if we saw ___," the plan probably isn't ready, and working out that question first will make most of the rest of it easier to write.
Consent templates, the full terms, and the administrative detail live in ConneXions: connexions.xfoundry.org.