Your new favourite band?
IT was only a matter of time before Amazon moved into the wearables market – and that day has come. The online shopping giant has revealed details of its first fitness tracking band – the Amazon Halo Band.
And while it lags behind its rivals in this space – particularly Apple with its smartwatch offering – Amazon will be hoping the unique features of its tracker (combined, of course with its epic distribution capabilities) will see it catch up fast.
Halo isn’t just a wearable wrist device – it’s also an app and a service – combined, the three elements come together to produce a fitness focussed system that offers more than the smartwatch makers have managed in the fitness space.
While the Apple Watch is many things, Halo just does fitness and wellbeing.
The first thing you’ll notice about the Band is that it has no screen – the device you wear on your wrist does nothing else but track your fitness and your mood. It does so using a variety of sensors – there’s an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, a heart rate monitor, two microphones, an LED indicator light, and a button to turn the microphones on or off. And that’s it. No distractions.
Most of the heavy-lifting is done by the app on your phone (which will be available for both Android and iOS).
The app is where the insights into the data gathered by the Band are managed – some data is sent off via the cloud to be analysed, but Amazon is at pains to point out from the off that there are strong locks against compromising the user’s privacy… and no wonder given the kind of data that is gathered.
Two of Halo’s headline features could potentially be a privacy nightmare for users, so it’s reassuring to see Amazon go to the lengths that it has to explain how they work.
The first is a feature that works on your phone to analyse your body itself – it’s called, unsurprisingly, Body, and it works by using your smartphone camera to scan your shape.
Yes – you have to stand in front of it (wearing as few tight-fitting clothes as possible) and let it take four pics of your whole body…
These pics, Amazon says, are sent off to the cloud for analysis before being deleted everywhere apart from on your phone – only you can ever see them.
The analysed images are able to reveal your body fat percentage (with the same accuracy as a doctor, Amazon says). Obviously the idea is that you scan regularly to monitor progress (or the lack thereof).
The other headline feature is called Tone. Throughout your day the Band captures snippets of your voice and analyses them to generate a picture of your mood – it measures the energy and positivity in your voice, which Amazon says can reveal all kinds of insights into your general well-being – from stress levels, to how various conversation types affect your mood.
You can even record a whole 30 minutes of your audio and have that analysed, which might be useful if you’re practising a presentation.
Again, Amazon has privacy in mind with this feature. You create a voice profile which is used to measure the other snippets against, and the analysis here is always done on your phone, with the collected clips deleted immediately after analysis. You can’t even listen to them yourself. And if you are ever in a situation you don’t want to be recorded, you can turn the Band’s mics off altogether.
Aside from those two features, you’re looking at fairly standard fitness tracking – it measures your Activity and Sleep patterns, with those, too, being analysed in the app to
Amazon’s new Halo marks its entry into wearable fitness tracking tech
help you make progress on all fronts.
The final fifth pillar to the service is a section called Labs – wellbeing challenges, experiments, and workouts devised to help users find the best way to get the service to work for them.
Amazon says these are all science-backed, and come not only from its own experts, but also third-parties like WW (WeightWatchers), Headspace, and the Mayo Clinic. More Lab sessions from other partners will be added soon.
At the moment the device is available only in the US for an initial period of “early access” to customers who apply. But the device is expected to go on general sale both in the US and UK in time for Christmas.
Pricing for the UK hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s expected to hit the market for under £100 with the full service offered for a subscription fee of around £3-a-month.
The Band and app will still work without subscription, but offer only basic functionality without in-depth data analysis.