Oura Ring’s Dr. Tanvi Jayaraman on serving women in the AI era with its first female-focused LLM, chatbot

Oura Health, the Finnish wearables company that has sold more than 5 million health tracker rings, is betting on women’s health with the launch of its first-ever proprietary large language model designed specifically for women. 

“We know historically that women have been underrepresented when it comes to a lot of [medical and pharmaceutical] research,” Tanvi Jayaraman, MD, clinical lead of health AI at Oura, told Glossy. “We want to change that narrative when it comes to women's health.”

LLMs are the brains behind AI chatbots, including Oura’s in-app Advisor chat where users can ask general wellness questions, specifics about their personal health data or in-depth medical questions. 

“Women have been searching for answers [about our health and bodies on the internet] for just as long as the research has been done,” she said. “The answers that [women are] looking for are really disparate and scattered. They're on a niche Reddit forum, or they're kind of word-of-mouth, so a lot of [what we learn online is] hypothesis-driven, data-gathering one-offs.”

Starting last year, Dr. Jayaraman’s team of board-certified clinicians began “training” Oura’s new LLM with only the best data and studies available. This is juxtaposed against many other LLMs, which are trained on the internet at large, which can result in hearsay and causality connections being learned as fact, Dr. Jayaraman said.  

“[When we’re able to] pick and choose the right training data, the right sources, the right guidelines for women's health, then you can start to push away some of that noise [from the internet],” she said. “Of course, we have a long way to go when it comes to the actual research, but you have to start somewhere.” 

Dr. Jayaraman represents a new type of physician who bridges medicine, artificial intelligence and product strategy. 

After medical school at Stanford, she worked on AI strategy projects at Bain & Company, working for global diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies, then on Apple’s clinical team, where she worked on next-gen digital health tools. She joined Oura last year. 

Dr. Jayaraman joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss Oura’s new women-focused LLM, the future of AI-powered wellness chatbots and more.