Amazon Halo Band & Membership: Everything You Need To Know
'Big Four' tech conglomerate Amazon has entered the fitness tech game by announcing its new Halo device, a health and wellness band complete with advanced technologies to perform a plethora of tasks to track owners daily health practices. Halo is currently only available via discounted early access, but will be on sale to the public soon for $99.
Originally founded in 1994 as an online marketplace for books, Amazon has since expanded into selling and quickly delivering mostly anything a customer could dream of. In addition to its marketplace, Amazon has expanded to original streaming content, advanced AI assistance, and cloud computing. In 2015, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States. In developing its own devices, Amazon has given its customers tools to easily stream its original content, and turn on their home lights or lock their doors with a simple command, but this is its first genuine venture into health and fitness.
At first glance, Amazon seems to have done its homework in development of this band. The store page for Halo offers a short animated video outlining all the features inside the screen-less wristband, and its features are robust. While some of the technologies within Halo are not new, Amazon appears to have put a lot of its weight and resources behind the science and technology in this device, in a bid position it as the most accurate and advanced in its class. Apart from no screen to avoid daily dopamine inducing distractions, the band offers 'Body' - an included feature that uses machine learning and computer vision to track its wearer's movement, sleep patterns and body composition. There is a catch though; to use all of these features and more, Amazon requires a membership.
You can't put a price on your health... but Amazon sure can. While all Halo devices come with a six-month membership subscription included to utilize all its features, customers will then be auto-renewed into a $3.99 a month fee (plus tax) to continue using them. Some would argue it's a small price to pay for the advanced features and mapped progress the device offers, but most other wearable fitness bands do not charge a monthly service fee. The membership includes full access to 'Body,' more specific activity tracking (informed by guidelines from the American Heart Association), as well as detailed sleep analysis. Another interesting feature included is 'Tone of Voice' that listens to your voice (and your voice only Amazon claims) to track how the energy and positivity in your speech and social engagement changes throughout your day.
Another cool feature included in the Halo membership is access to 'Labs.' These are trackable challenges and experiments created by health experts like the Mayo Clinic to help push people's healthy habits. Whether someone decides to tidy up their living space or walk around while speaking on the phone is up to them, but 'Labs' will help nudge them to be better. If one decides the $3.99 membership is too steep, they will still have access to some features, although somewhat nominal. The Halo would then downgrade itself to the most basic of fitness trackers, retaining access to basic sleep time, heart rate monitoring, and step tracking. Some smartphones can handle that.
From what has been revealed and explained by Amazon so far, the Halo wearable band shows a lot of promise at a reasonable price. Especially for someone who takes their daily healthy seriously, or someone who has always wanted to, but never truly found the right tools to do so. The legitimacy of these AI health claims will come to trial more as the Halo Prime delivers itself to doorsteps across the world, but for now this device seems like it could be a bonafide contender.
Source: Amazon