 What's going on everyone? It's Dave with AlexFergus.com and today we're taking a moment to take a look at Aura's new moment feature that was recently released with their iOS application. Aura has released an update that has a couple of different guided meditation and breathing exercise modes as well as a sort of status check and body biometric recording feature. So today we're going to take a look at the feature inside of the app and see what features are available, what soundscapes that it has, what kind of data it collects to see if maybe the moment feature might be a deciding factor or a value added proposition for you if you haven't already bought an Aura ring or if you already own the Aura ring, whether it's a feature that maybe you should take a second look at and maybe a deeper dive into. So with that said, let's take a moment to take a look at Aura's new moment feature. Okay, so we're taking a look here at the moment feature in the Aura app. Yeah, I actually got quite a bit of sleep last night, but yeah. So anyway, to access the moment feature, you're going to click on the little plus icon down in the lower right hand side. You'll see that comes up right there. So you can take a note, you can record an activity or take a moment. So let's take a look at the moment. So you can restart your previous session. I think that's a pretty nice little feature there. If you've already dialed in what you did, you can do it again the next time. So the first mode that they've got here is called Presence. Bring your attention to the present moment. So Presence has a mindful meditation called Oak. So let's take a look at that. So the Presence mindful meditation is a guided session, and it's 10 minutes long. You can see that down there. Or if you want, you can click over here and do an unguided session. And then if you do the unguided session, you can choose your duration. So let's take a look at that. So I can choose anywhere from one minute, and you'll see just your heart rate, all the way up to open-ended session or one hour or 60 minutes. Now, depending upon how long your session is, we'll determine what exact information the Aura Ring will gather. So at one minute, you're only going to get your lowest heart rate. Two minutes, same. Three minutes will give you your lowest heart rate and your HRV average. Five minutes, then you'll bump up to your heart rate trend and your HRV trend. Now if you move up a little higher, you still get trend on both heart rate and HRV. So anything under about five minutes, you're only going to get your lowest in average. Once you bump up to five, then you'll start seeing your trends. So let's go back. So the next exciting thing here is soundscape. There are a lot of different soundscapes. And unfortunately, they're not going to come through during this recording. Let's see here. Maybe they might. So in silence, which is obviously silent, but you've got at the station, okay, forest floor, rainfall, there's some bells, harmonic field, which is kind of like music, pink static, white static. And at the end of the session, if you want to hear a chime, you can toggle that on and off right there. So those are the different soundscapes. You can also enable or disable screen auto lock. So that means your phone won't, the screen won't shut off and it'll lock you out and you'll have to use your thumb print or your pin to get back into your phone. That's a nice feature because if you're getting kind of antsy during a session, you can crack your eye open and see how many minutes are left on your session because when you start a session, which I'll show you in a second, there is an on-screen countdown timer. So that's presence. Now rest is a breathing exercise. So let's go in there. It's a seven minute long guided breathing exercise. And just like the other one, you can choose all the different soundscapes are available, as well as toggling the end of session chime there. You can also do exactly the same, disable your screen auto lock. And on this one, if you don't want to use the guided restful breathing right here, you can also choose just calming sounds and then choose your soundscape like that and then choose your duration. Let's do 15 minutes. Boom, you're done and then you just hit start and this is what it looks like. So you get a little countdown so you can sit down and get comfortable and the music starts and then we go into our countdown. And then you can always end the session early by just clicking on end early. And then as you can see around the edge of the timer there, there's a little status bar that'll fill up as the seconds countdown so you can end early. And then thank you for taking this moment. Nice. And then it'll return you to actually, it'll ask you how you feel. So it's kind of like a self-assessment here. I felt, you know, same as usual. And yeah, excessive hand movement. I wasn't expecting anything here from that. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete that session. There we go. Let's go back to moment. So, and the third is body status. Body status is pretty much the same as presence or rest. The only difference is there's no guided option here. It's just simply duration and soundscape. So, yep, that kind of leads me to wonder why there's three different things when the only difference being between presence and rest is what guided option you have. You know, it seems to me they could combine all three of these together. And then when you go and, you know, and just have, you know, different options here for the two different guided session or no guided session, you know, I'm not really sure why they're broken out like that because you don't get different information post session from any of these. You know, they all report HRV and heart rate data, which we'll take a look at here. Because if you want to take a look at your history of all your moment sessions, there's a little clock icon up in the right hand top right hand corner. You just click on that. There we go. And you can scroll through all of your your presence sessions. And let's take a look at the one that I did yesterday. So this is what your post session information will look like. So you'll get a trend line here showing the heart rate over time and my HRV over time. Looks like my heart HRV went up and then it came back down and I was feeling better than usual after that one. Looks like I managed to lower my overall heart rate and it does show you your nighttime baseline as well as your nighttime baseline for your HRV as well. So that is pretty much it for the moment feature that Aura has released on the iOS platform. I think it's great. But let's go back up top and take a look at some pros, some cons, and some final thoughts on the moment feature. So now that we've taken a look, or actually a moment, I can't get over that, it never gets old, with the moment feature inside of the Aura app, what are some pros and what are some cons that I found while using this? Well, I like the fact that it's really easy to access. It's right there on the main home screen. You don't have to dig around through sub menus to find the feature. It's just right there. Hit the little plus button, hit moment, and you're ready to go. Another awesome feature is that it's got multiple modes, which I will get to in a second about it being kind of possibly a con. You have body, rest, and status. I think it's great that you could do breathing exercises or a mindfulness exercise, or none at all if you just want to do a quick biometric scan to see what your HRV and heart rate are doing. I think that's great. I also like all the different soundscapes they offer. There's a wide range of soundscapes from crunching leaves in the forest to white and pink noise. They're all really high quality and they sound awesome. And I like the fact that you can choose any of those soundscapes with the guided sessions. I like the fact that the graphs are really easy to read and show you exactly what your heart rate was doing or what your HRV was doing during each session. I think Aura did a really good job. Good job Aura on nailing those graphs. I think the biggest pro for me is that there's no additional cost. There's no subscription or upgrade purchase that you need to make inside the app to gain this feature. I think that's great. Other products like the BioStrap allow you to do meditation, but if you want to have any kind of soundscape, you're going to have to pay for a subscription, which is, I don't know how many, I think it's $9 a month or something like that, or five to $9 a month. With Aura, it's just included in the iOS app itself for free. I think that's great. And I think that if you don't like it, then just don't use it. But if you are interested in getting an Aura ring and you want to be able to meditate and track your biometrics while you meditate, this feature is right up your alley. So what are some cons? What are some things that I didn't necessarily like about the moment feature? Well, I can't really complain because it was an update and free, but I'd like to see possibly more guided sessions updated and added. It's nice that they're including one for rest and one for presence, but hopefully down the road, they'll update and add additional guided sessions in the future. Another minor thing that I found kind of annoying was that the time intervals, once you got above like three minutes, were all in chunks of five minutes at a time. I'd like to be able to sometimes do 12 or 13 minutes and not have to select 15, 20, 25, 30. It's just minor and it's not really anything that's going to impact the functionality of the feature. It's just one thing that I found that if I had nitpick a little bit, that's one thing right there. Another possible downside is it will drain the battery of your Aura ring down faster the more you use it. Because you are activating the sensors in the ring, I found that using the moment feature on a consistent basis usually shaved off about a day of my battery. So if I was getting about six days of battery life on my Aura ring, I was getting about five days if I was using the moment feature once a day for about anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. So it's not that big of an impact on the ring's battery life, but it's something to be made aware of that, yeah, you are going to be burning the battery a little bit more. And finally, the last thing is that there doesn't seem to be a big difference between the different modes other than what guided session is available. Maybe in the future the app developers will figure out a way just to combine them all down together where it's just a drop down and you just pick whether you want to do, you know, breathing exercise or a mindfulness guided session or none, choose your soundscape, set your time and then just go. It would clean up and simplify the interface even more. And Aura is really good about doing updates and pushing those out. So it wouldn't surprise me if that's something that they decide to go with down the road, but it's not a big deal at all really because you don't get different details of information from the different modes. I mean, it would make sense if one mode gave you, you know, respiration rate if you're doing the breathing one and the mindfulness one gave you more details on something else, you know. But considering that you're getting HRV and heart rate data from both modes, it doesn't really make sense that they've got it broken out the way they do. But like I said, that's just a minor quibble. So is this a thumbs up or a thumbs down for me? Well, I have to give it an enthusiastic two thumbs up because it didn't cost anything extra. If you already own the Aura Ring and you're using iOS, it's right there waiting for you to try. So I can't complain about it because it didn't cost anything. If you're on the fence about getting an Aura Ring, you might want to take a closer look because the integration of the breathing and meditation functionality kind of puts the product just a little bit more up there. It's an extra added value that you're getting from the Aura Ring itself. Not only are you able to track your sleep and your recovery, but now you can track your meditation and your breathing too. So I think it's overall a great thing that Aura has decided to include in their app and product. And I can't wait to see the direction that Aura is going to take this. I hope that they expand it, add additional guided sessions, maybe even rotate through some new soundscapes. Whoever is doing the soundscapes and in charge of doing the guided sessions, they're doing a great job. And I'd like to encourage Aura to keep developing the moment feature. So that said, two thumbs up from me and I'm Dave with alexfurgus.com. Hope you're having a great day out there and until next time, see you around.