Amazon has steadily been expanding its hardware offerings over the years, including smart speakers, phones, tablets, and earbuds. Now Amazon is getting into the wearable game, too.
Amazon Halo Band is a new device that's meant to monitor your health and wellness. It's a small wearable that goes on your wrist and communicates with the Halo app on your smartphone to focus on five areas where it can measure your health and help you improve it.
Those include activity, where the Halo Band can measure your activity and award you points based on walking and running. It'll measure your sleep, too, using motion, heart rate, and temperature to determine how much time you slept and how much time you spent in deep sleep and REM sleep. Each morning it'll give you a sleep score out of 100.
The Halo Band and its app can measure your body fat percentage, which Amazon says will help give you a more complete picture of your health. And because your wellness includes mental as well as physical wellbeing, the Halo Band and app has a Tone feature that "uses machine learning to analyze energy and positivity in a customer's voice so they can better understand how they may sound to others, helping improve their communication and relationships."
Finally, there's an Amazon Halo Labs feature that includes challenges, experiments, and workouts designed to help you build healthier habits.
All of those measurements could require a lot of personal info, and Amazon says that privacy is a main focus of Halo. Health data is encrypted both in transit and in the cloud, and users can download and delete their data at any time. Body scan images are deleted from the cloud after processing, and Amazon says that speech samples for the Tone feature are analyzed locally on your phone and automatically deleted after processing.
Looking at the hardware of the Amazon Halo Band, there's no screen on the device itself. It's got a sensor capsule that includes a heart rate monitor, a temperature sensor, an accelerometer, an LED indicator light, two microphones, and a button to turn those microphones off.
The Halo Band is water resistant so you can wear it all day, and Amazon says its battery will last seven days before needing a recharge. When it's time to plug in, the Halo Band will recharge fully in 90 minutes.
Amazon is launching the Halo Band in early access starting today, which means you'll need to request the ability to buy one. During the early access phase, the Halo Band will be sold for $64.99, down from its regular price of $99.99.
Included with the purchase of a Halo Band is six months of Halo membership, which includes access to all of the app's features. Non-members will have basic functionality like step counting, sleep time, and heart rate. After six months, membership will cost $3.99 per month.
