Amazon launches Halo Band

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Amazon has now made its way to the fitness industry with Halo - a smart, health-tracking band.

Amazon has now entered the fitness market with its health-tracking Halo band. Its primary goal is to focus on the physiological and mental health rather than on exercise and physical wellbeing. 

This smart band has the following features and sensors: an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, a heart rate monitor and microphones. What's very different is that there is no display screen here, the fabric and silicone bands also cover the front of the device. It is disconnected from other Amazon features and you won’t get notifications on your band and you can’t use the mics to ask Alexa a question. There’s a $4 a monthly subscription available, which you don’t get for free with Amazon Prime. While you can still use this band without a subscription, you may not be able to make the maximum use of it as you won't have access to certain advanced features.

The Amazon Halo Band is indeed one of its kind as it doesn’t have a screen which is one of its most unique features. This is very much unline the Apple Watch and Fitbit. The app that goes along with it comes with a set of fitness tracking features along with two innovative ideas: using your camera to create 3D scans for body fat and listening for the emotion in the tone your voice.

Halo mainly focuses on the psychological aspect of your physical wellbeing. The microphones built in are to listen to the tone of your voice and to determine your emotional state throughout the day. You’ll have to train the band to recognize your voice and differentiate it from that of others.

Voice recordings can be sent from the band directly to your phone to be analyzed and evaluated and once the phone is done, it deletes them. Recordings are never sent to Amazon servers, this ensures that your privacy is not compromised. You also have the option to mute the mic whenever you like. Another major feature of the Halo band is 3D body scanning, this, Amazon says is more informative than the plain weight and BMI readings you might get from regular scales and measures. The halo app uses your phone to take four photos. Those photos are then uploaded to Amazon servers where AI processing is done to turn them into a 3D model and calculate your total fat. There's no compromise on privacy as Amazon says this data is never shared in any way, shape or form. In fact, this data is deleted withi 12 hours of time. Body scans and other tone data can be individually deleted from the rest of your health data. Your Halo profile is distinct from your Amazon account that you have access to.

The device costs $100 while extra bands are $16 for the silicone ones and $20 for the fabric ones. Battery life is about a week and the best part is that the band is waterproof up to 50 ATM and takes about 90 minutes to charge.  Users can always download or delete their data at any time directly from the app.

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