A wristband without a screen. A service that scans your body through your camera. An always-listening voice analysis that provides guidance on emotional tone. Amazon’s entry into the fitness space is truly strange and ambitious. And we just get our minds around it.
Amazon has entered the health and fitness world with Halo, a subscription service and accompanying fitness band that unlocks an array of health metrics, including activity, sleep, body fat and tone of voice analysis, to determine your moods and your speech.
The band itself looks a lot like a screenless Fitbit tracker, but with a few different elements: It has temperature sensing, much like Fitbit’s latest smartwatch, the Fitbit Sense, and a microphone that continuously scans a wearer’s voice to determine emotional tone. Yes, it is a lot to take in. And the service is immediately available for early access. We have not even had a chance to try it out.
The membership share will start at $ 65 for the first six months ($ 100 if the early access deal is over) and then $ 3.99 a month thereafter. (International prices are not available at the moment, but $ 65 converts to around £ 50 or AU $ 90.) The Halo subscription includes the basic fitness band that has one button, no screen and your heart rate, steps and temperature follow. The lack of screen means you have to rely on the mobile app to see all your data, but it does much more than just count your steps and log your weight.
An always-listening, emotionally-analyzing Amazon health band that also lets you scan your body fat sounds like Black mirror incarnation, but it also opens up some ideas in fitness that we have never seen before.
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Amazon Halo: A fitness tracker and health subscription …
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Body fat analysis with a smartphone camera
Amazon thinks that the concept of weight loss is wrong, and that body fat is a much better predictor of health.
Most of us are conditioned to obsess over our weight. The entire diet industry was built on it with programs, apps and devices revolving around ways to lose weight.
But weight can fluctuate daily based on factors including humidity, medication, menstrual cycle and illness. Plus muscle is denser than fat, and a scale can not tell the difference between the two. You could literally work your ass to build muscle and burn fat, and the numbers on the scale would not look down.
Instead of relying on weight, Halo focuses on body fat percentage, which is less volatile and takes much more time and effort to change.
The gold standard in the medical world for body composition analyzes is a DEXA (dual energy absorptiometry) scan, which can cost up to $ 100 in a lab. The Halo app does it all with your smartphone camera. Once you take your photos, the app automatically eliminates everything else in the background, calculates body fat percentage based on body indicators, and then creates a 3D model of your body, which is both cool and awesome. The app requires you to wear minimal form-fitting clothing and Amazon trusts you to take a photo of you wearing it. The whole process takes seconds.
Amazon’s Halo app creates a 3D rendering of your body to analyze body fat, while the fitness band keeps tabs on sleep and activity.
Amazon
If you feel uncomfortable, this is not surprising: the idea of body scans with a camera is already an awkward statement. Amazon does this on a healthcare platform making it more. The preview of body scan images Amazon made me look very personal – not necessarily what I would ever want someone else to see.
Therefore, Amazon promises that the completed body scans will remain on your phone and will not be shared with anyone, including the company, unless you choose to do so. According to Amazon, “the images are processed in the cloud but encrypted in transit and processed within seconds, after which they are automatically deleted from Amazon’s systems and databases. All scan images are completely deleted within 12 hours. The scan images are not viewed by everyone at Amazon and are not used for machine learning optimizations. “
See that tone!
Halo also offers a tone analysis, which has nothing to do with body tone, but rather analyzes the emotion of your voice. It also lets you know when you sound out of line, strangely enough.
The fitness band has two built-in microphones to record audio and listens to emotional cues. The company says it is not meant to analyze your conversation, but the tone of your voice. You can turn this off by tapping the side button and will know when the microphone is off when a red LED on the band lights up.
Otherwise, the voice scan happens continuously, extracting the wearer’s voice specifically and providing analysis with relevant emotional tones (such as “happy” or “worried” in the Halo app). The idea, according to Amazon, is to help guide a wearer to deliver better tones of voice and speaking styles, almost a focal form of attitude. It is not intended as a form of psychological analysis, but it seems terribly difficult to draw the line on a concept like this.
Amazon has been researching the idea of emotional tone sensing since at least 2018, but this is the first time it has approached the idea in any device. And according to Amazon, Tone is currently only available on the Halo Band. Tone will be limited to the Halo band’s microphone, but Amazon sounds open to exploring the idea on other devices, depending on how the response of early access carriers of first wave goes. It’s a very strange addition to a fitness band, and we have no idea how to use it yet.
Amazon promises that Tone voice samples will be encrypted and stored only on a carrier’s phone (shared via band via Bluetooth with the encrypted key), deleted after analysis, and will not be shared to the cloud or used to to build machine learning models.
Sleep analysis followed by temperature
The sleep analysis includes a body temperature to detect variations that may affect sleep.
Amazon
The app offers a comprehensive sleep analysis with a breakdown of the different stages of sleep and overall sleep score, just like other fitness trackers. It also goes beyond the basics by keeping track of your overall body temperature while sleeping and creating a baseline for each person. It then charts your average temperature each night relative to your baseline to help you identify variations that may affect your health and the quality of your sleep.
The Halo Band will not provide a specific body temperature, similar to the way other temperature values like the Oura Ring already work.
Temperature has become a trending worthy metric during the COVID-19 era: The Oura Ring has one and Fitbit’s latest Sense watch also has one. Amazon’s Halo team is conducting research into COVID-19 symptom detection on their values, just like other health value companies, but no specific studies or plans have been laid yet.
Track activity: One week at a glance
The activity app is based on a weekly points system.
Amazon
Halo also does basic fitness tracking based on the band’s information. It can track walks and runs automatically, but you need to go to the app and tag all other workouts manually.
It rewards you for any kind of movement or activity, but gives you more points for intense workouts and deducts points for sedentary time. And it does not keep a daily count of your activity, your score is based on the points you accumulated throughout the week. The whole picture of exercise, sitting time and active time is combined in one tally.
Amazon’s sleep and activity score and other AI tools will require an Amazon Halo subscription; otherwise the band will default to basic data for tracking. As well as Fitbit and its Premium service, this seems to be a trend going through of fitness devices expecting a subscription model as part of the package.
Lots of labs and partners, but no Google or Apple integration
A Labs section of Amazon Halo looks like what’s Fitbit’s Premium service, with many multi-week health and fitness goals to choose from, and partners have been drafted from OrangeTheory to Weight Watchers. Amazon promises that these challenges will be scientifically controlled, but it also sounds like these challenges will be added over time.
But at least at launch, Halo will not join Apple’s HealthKit as Google’s Fit App, which puts it at a disadvantage with people who are already deeply invested in or pursuing health care. Amazon relies on Weight Watchers, the wellness program of John Hancock Vitality, and a few others who are able to hook up to health data from Amazon Halo.
The looming privacy issue
There is a lot of process in terms of features, and while some may seem interesting and innovative, privacy is the biggest barrier to entry. Sharing any kind of health data (let alone unflattering seminudes) requires confidence at the next level, and you may not be ready to give Amazon that confidence. The company does not have exactly the most intangible record when it comes to keeping user data private. Alexa-enabled devices have been around for quite some time storing private conversations “for machine learning purposes.” En The ringtone of Amazon has had a series of privacy dust-ups.
Halo puts privacy in your hands by choosing to share data with Amazon and third-party apps and turn off the microphone on the tape, but it will still be a fierce battle. That is, unless their features are editable and worth the privacy risk, that remains to be seen.
Amazon is late on arrival
The lack of connection to Apple as Google tells. Amazon is making a game in the health and fitness data space, and with Google, Fitbit and Apple already deep in, it’s a big question how Amazon will make waves. Or, where Amazon Halo will go next. It’s a platform as much as portable, and it sounds like experimentation from Halo’s early access may just be the tip of the iceberg.
