Amazon Halo: a fitness band and app that scans your body, listens to your voice

Filed under:It makes a 3D model of your body and tracks the emotional tone in your voiceAmazon is getting into the health gadget market with a new fitness band and subscription service called Halo. They’re short challenges designed to improve your health habits — like meditation, improving your sleep habits, or starting up basic exercise routines.The Halo Band “is not a medical device,” Amazon tells me. The former uses your smartphone camera to capture a 3D scan of your body and then calculate your body fat, and the latter uses a microphone on the Halo Band to listen to the tone of your voice and report back on your emotional state throughout the day.Body scans work with just your smartphone’s camera. Finally, although anybody 13 years of age and up can use the Halo Band, the body scan feature will only be allowed for people 18 or older.The microphone on the Amazon Halo Band isn’t meant for voice commands; instead it listens to your voice and reports back on what it believes your emotional state was throughout the day. Amazon isn’t even allowing Halo to integrate with other fitness apps like Apple Health at launch. Some of the key points include:The body scanning and tone features might be the most flashy (or, depending on your perspective, most creepy) parts of Halo, but the thing you’ll likely spend the most time watching is your activity score.Amazon’s Halo app tracks your cardio fitness on a weekly basis instead of daily — allowing for rest days. Instead of the Apple Watch’s hourly “stand” prompts, the Halo app tracks how long you have been “sedentary.” If you go for more than eight hours without doing much (not counting sleep), the app will begin to deduct from your weekly activity score.The Halo Band can automatically detect activities like walking and running, but literally every other type of exercise will need to be manually entered into the app.