Amazon is getting into the health gadget market with a new fitness band and subscription service called Halo. Unlike the Apple Watch or even most basic Fitbits, the Amazon Halo Band doesn’t have a screen. The Halo Band will cost $99.99 and the service costs $3.99 per month. Amazon is launching it as an invite-only early access program today with an introductory price of $64.99 that includes six months of the service for free.
Special Features of Halo
There are special features of this smart band. They are Body scanning and tracking the tone of your voice like whether you are happy or sad and also about the sleep and your activity tracking.
Body scans work with just your smartphone’s camera. The app will instruct you to wear tight-fitting clothing and then stand six feet back from your camera.
Then it takes four photos and uploads them to Amazon’s servers. They’re combined into a 3D scan of your body that’s sent back to your phone. The data is then deleted from Amazon’s servers.
Once Scanned, Amazon uses Machine learning to evaluate the fat percentage. Amazon also claims that smart scales that try to measure body fat using bioelectrical impedance are not as accurate as of its scan.
2.Tracking the tone of your voice
Halo app listens to your voice and reports back on what it believes your emotional state was throughout the day. If you don’t opt-in, the microphone on the Band doesn’t do anything at all.
If you were opt-in, then the Halo app will have you read some text back to it so that it can train a model on your voice, allowing the Halo Band to the only key in on your tone and not those around you.
3.Sleep and Activity Tracking
Halo app tracks your cardio fitness on a weekly basis instead of daily. It uses this information to distinguish between intense, moderate, and light activity.
Halo Band’s sleep tracking similarly tries to create a score, though you can dig in and view details on your remaining sleep and other metrics.
Amazon has said that “multiple layers of privacy and security are built into the service to keep data safe and in customers’ control.” Users can download or delete their data at any time directly from the app.
As of now, the Amazon Halo fitness service premieres in the USA, and will likely be introduced in other nations in the coming weeks or months.
