Amazon debuts Halo smart health subscription service and Halo Band wearable activity tracker – TechCrunch

Amazon has launched an entirely new membership program called Halo Comprehensive monitoring and counseling of personal health and wellbeing are to take place today. The Halo service, which opens for early access by special request today, includes both the service and a new wrist-worn activity tracker from Amazon Halo Band for $ 64.99 for a six-month membership. According to Amazon, the standard public price will be $ 99.99 once it becomes more widely available.

Halo does more than just the standard health tracking gadget and app by comprehensively examining various health measures, including body fat percentage, which are measured at home using just your smartphone camera and the Amazon Halo app. The company said it was able to make this possible through its own advances in image processing and machine learning. Amazon uses deep neural network-based processing of your uploaded photos to separate your body from its surroundings, to analyze so-called body fat hotspots, where it is easier to measure body fat percentage, and then to create a 3D model of your body. You can then use a slider to adjust your body fat percentage up or down to see what effect the increase or loss of body fat would actually have on your body.

Credit: Amazon

Amazon claims its technology is capable of delivering an accuracy that meets the standards a doctor could determine in a clinical setting – and that is twice as accurate as it is currently with other methods at home, including smart scales , is possible.

In the meantime, the Amazon Halo Band is a small, slim, wrist-worn device that can capture other health measurements, including activity, skin temperature, sleep states (including REM, light, and deep sleep). It has an accelerometer, a heart rate monitor, two microphones and is waterproof. The built-in rechargeable battery can be used for up to a week on a 90 minute charge and is compatible with a variety of different switching style band accessories.

Another unique vector that Amazon measures in addition to activity, sleep, and body fat percentage is what Tit calls “tone” – that’s why the Halo Band has microphones on board. That monitors your voice and applies machine learning to determine factors like “energy and positivity”. According to Amazon, this can provide them with unique insights, such as whether “a difficult work call leads to less positive communication with a customer’s family.”

Credit: Amazon

The obvious, obvious concern here is that Amazon Halo is seeking unprecedented access to someone’s personal information in order to infer their insights. Amazon wants to collect information about the time, duration and quality of your sleep. biometric data including heart rate and body temperature; Information about when and where you exercise; and even highly precise and detailed information about the physical condition of your body – not to mention what your voice sounds like and what that might tell you about your mental state.

A Halo press release stated that both Halo and Body were created with privacy in mind, and that body scans are automatically deleted from any servers that hold them after processing. They are then only stored locally on your phone, and Amazon says this means “nobody but you will ever see them” unless you want to share them. It also states that all health data is “encrypted in transit and in the cloud,” so customers can delete their data at any time. According to Amazon, voice and voice data is analyzed locally on the phone itself and deleted immediately after processing so that no one ever hears it – not even the customer himself.

Credit: Amazon

Even so, this gives Amazon a lot of confidence and intelligence, and while the raw data may be protected, the insights gathered, even if anonymized, obviously offer a lot more value to Amazon in terms of its ability to optimize the overall product offerings and create additional opportunities for things like the emerging healthcare business. However, the Alexa voice assistant and Amazon’s ecosystem don’t seem to put customers off. Hence, it will be interesting to see how many are open to sharing even more information with Amazon for guided health and wellness advice.