Amazon Halo fitness tracker sounds awesome

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 how you sound to others. Amazon’s entry into the fitness space is odd indeed, and ambitious. The Amazon Halo health band itself looks a lot like a screenless Fitbit tracker, but with a few different elements.

The Amazon Halo health band has temperature sensing, much like Fitbit’s newest smartwatch, the Fitbit Sense, and a microphone that continually scans a wearer’s voice to determine emotional tone. Amazon Halo service is immediately available for early access. Amazon Halo membership will start at $65 for the first six months and then $3.99 a month after that.

International prices are not currently available. The subscription to Amazon Halo includes the basic fitness band that has one button, no screen, and tracks your heart rate, steps, and temperature. The lack of screen means you will have to rely on the mobile app to see all your data, but Amazon Halo does a lot more than just count your steps and log your weight.

A tone-analyzing Amazon Halo health band that also scans your body fat is opening up some ideas in fitness that we have never seen before.

Amazon thinks the concept of weight loss is flawed, and that body fat is a much better predictor of health. Most of us have been conditioned to obsess over our weight. The entire diet industry was built on it with programs, apps, and devices that revolve around ways to lose pounds. But weight can fluctuate daily based on factors including humidity, medication, menstrual cycle, and illness.

Plus muscle is more dense than fat, and a scale can not tell the difference between the two. You could literally work your ass off building muscle and burning fat, and not see the numbers on the scale go down. Rather than relying on weight, Amazon Halo health band focuses on body fat percentage, which is less volatile and takes a lot more time and work to change.

The gold standard in the medical world for body composition analysis is a dual-energy absorptiometry (DEXA) scan, which can cost up to $100 at a lab. The Amazon Halo app does it all using your smartphone camera. Once you take your photos, the app automatically eliminates everything else in the background, calculates body fat percent based on body indicators, and then creates a 3D model of your body, which is both cool and terrifying.

The Halo app requires you to wear minimal form-fitting clothing and trust Amazon to take a picture of you wearing it.

The entire process takes seconds. If you are feeling uncomfortable, that is not surprising. The idea of body-scanning with a camera is already an awkward proposition. Amazon doing this on a health platform makes it feel more so. The body-scan images look very personal, not something you would ever want anyone else to see. That is why Amazon promises that the body-scan images stay on your phone and will not be shared with anybody, including the company, unless you opt into that.

The body-scan 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 body-scan images are fully deleted within 12 hours. The body-scan images are not viewed by anyone at Amazon and are not used for machine learning optimizations. The Amazon Halo app also offers a Tone analysis, which has nothing to do with body tone, but rather analyzes the nuances of your voice to paint a picture of how you sound to others.

The Amazon Halo app can let you know when you have sounded out of line, weirdly enough. The Amazon Halo health band has two built-in mics to capture audio and it listens for emotional cues. Amazon says it is not intended to analyze the content of your conversation, just the tone of your delivery. The Amazon Halo health band takes periodic samples of your speech throughout the day if you opt in to the feature.

You enable the microphones by tapping the side button and you will know when a red LED lights up on the Amazon Halo health band.

The voice scanning pulls out the wearer’s specific voice in conversations and delivers analysis with related emotional-tone words like “happy” or “concerned” in the Amazon Halo app. The idea is to help guide you to deliver better tones of voice and speaking styles, like a vocal form of good posture. The Tone feature is not intended as a form of psychological analysis, but it seems awfully hard to draw the line on a concept like this.

Amazon has been exploring the idea of emotional tone-sensing since at least 2018, but this is the first time the company has approached the idea in any device. The Tone feature is only available on the Amazon Halo health band for now. The Tone feature will be limited to the Halo health band’s microphone, but Amazon sounds open to exploring the idea on other devices, depending on how the early access response goes from first-wave wearers.

It is a very odd thing to put on a fitness band, and we have no idea what this is like to use yet. Amazon promises that Tone voice samples are encrypted and stored only on a wearer’s phone, are deleted after analysis, and will not be shared to the cloud or used to build machine-learning models. The Amazon Halo app provides a comprehensive sleep analysis with a breakdown of the different stages of sleep and overall sleep score, much like other fitness trackers.

The Amazon Halo app also goes beyond the basics by keeping track of your overall body temperature during sleep and creating a baseline for each person.

The Halo app then charts your average temperature each night relative to your baseline to help you identify variations that could affect your health and the quality of your sleep. The Halo health band will not provide a specific body temperature, similar to the way other temperature wearable devices like the Oura Ring already work. Temperature has become a trending wearable metric in the covid era.

The Oura Ring has one and Fitbit’s newest Sense watch has one too. Amazon is pursuing research for covid symptom detection on its wearables, much like other health wearable companies, but no specific studies or plans have been laid out yet. The Halo app also does basic fitness tracking based on the information from the Halo health band. The Halo health band can automatically track walks and runs, but you will have to go into the Halo app and tag any other workouts manually.

The Halo app rewards you for any type of movement or activity, but gives more points for more intense workouts and subtracts points for sedentary time. And the Halo app does not keep a daily tally of your activity, your score is based on the points you accrued during the entire week. The entire picture of exercise, sedentary time, and active time is combined into one tally.

Amazon’s sleep and activity scores and other AI tools will require a Halo subscription, otherwise, the Halo health band will default to more basic tracking data.

Much like Fitbit and its Premium service, this looks to be continuing a trend of fitness devices that expect a subscription model as part of the package. A Labs section of Halo app looks similar to what is on Fitbit’s Premium service, with a lot of multiweek health and fitness goals to opt into, and partners lined up from OrangeTheory to Weight Watchers. Amazon promises these challenges are scientifically vetted, and it also sounds like these challenges will keep being added to over time.

But at least at launch, Halo app will not tie in to Apple’s HealthKit or Google’s Fit App which puts it at a disadvantage with people who are already deeply invested in either for health tracking. Amazon is leaning on Weight Watchers, John Hancock Vitality wellness program, and a few others that will be able to hook into Halo health data. There is a lot of process in terms of features, and while some seem interesting and innovative, the biggest barrier to entry is privacy.

Sharing any kind of health data requires next-level trust, and you might not be prepared to give Amazon that trust. Amazon does not exactly have the most pristine track record when it comes to keeping user data private. Alexa-enabled devices have been in the hot seat for storing private conversations for machine learning purposes. And Amazon’s Ring doorbell has had a series of privacy dust-ups.

Halo puts privacy in your hands by allowing you to opt out of data sharing with Amazon and third-party apps as well as disable the microphone on the band, but it is still going to be an uphill battle.

That is unless its features prove to be earth-shattering and worth the privacy risk, which remains to be seen. The lack of connection to Apple or Google is telling. Amazon’s making a play in the health and fitness data space, and with Google, Fitbit, and Apple already deep in, it is a big question as to how the company will make waves or where it will go next.

It is a platform as much as a wearable, and it sounds like Halo’s early-access experiment may just be the tip of the iceberg.