This is the Amazon Halo, and it could be the best fitness tracker of 2020. Well, Amazon finally threw their hat into the fitness tracker ring by introducing this—the Amazon Halo. It has some of the same old flavors and features that you're used to, but it also comes to the table with some really interesting new features and tricks.
Activity Tracking
The Amazon Halo does track your activity, and it does so in the same ways that your Whoop, Apple Watch, or Fitbit would. It uses a three-axis gyroscope and accelerometer in conjunction with your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). Right when you set up your Amazon Halo for the first time, it's going to ask you for your height, weight, age, and gender.
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The Halo measures your steps, total calories burned, resting and max heart rates, but it's also going to measure how much time you spend in each intensity zone—from extremely intense all the way down to sedentary time. It gives you a point value depending on how long you spent in each of those zones.
- Intense Activity Zone: 2 points per minute
- Moderate Activity: 1 point per minute
- Light Activity: 1 point for every 20 minutes
- Sedentary Zone: Subtract 1 point for every hour
With a 150-point daily goal, Amazon came to this recommendation via the World Health Organization, the American Heart Association, and the CDC. If you don't have your Amazon Halo on, you can manually enter the activity. For ideas on staying more active, click on the "Lab" section of the app, where you'll find a plethora of movement styles like yoga from Open Fit, cardio from Orange Theory, and many more.
Sleep Tracking
Amazon Halo also tracks your sleep. In the Sleep section, you just click on that, and it's going to give you a score out of 100. This number takes into account total sleep time, the time it took you to fall asleep, the amount of time you were awake, and how much time you spent in each stage of sleep.
- Score over 85: Great night's sleep
- Score under 70: Consider making adjustments
Tone Analysis
Have you ever thought, "I wonder how I sound to the people I talk to?" Well, now you can. Amazon Halo introduces Tone, which helps you understand how you sound to others. When we better understand what makes us sound the way we do, we can make choices that improve our relationships—and our relationships have a big impact on our overall health.
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Amazon Halo has a built-in mic, and during the setup process, it walks you through a set of six paragraphs that you read so it can understand your tone and how you speak. It then creates an audio profile. During conversations throughout the day, it breaks down those conversations into tone categories:
- Amused, Excited, or Delighted
- Content, Appreciative, and Caring
- Reserved, Discouraged, or Worried
- Displeased, Irritated, or Enraged
Tone's aim is to help you better understand important trends in your daily conversations. Do you consistently wake up irritated and speak to those around you in an irritated fashion? Are the emotions you're trying to convey being received accurately? This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this introduced in a fitness tracker, and I actually think it's really cool.
Body Composition
As a trainer, I try to get my clients to steer clear from poor ways of measuring health improvement. We've been using scales for thousands of years, but when it comes to measuring our health, weight doesn't tell the whole story. How do we know if that weight is made up of muscle or fat? That's where body composition comes in. It's clinically proven to be a better measure of health than a scale alone.
Using computer vision and advanced machine learning, Amazon Halo is actually the first app-based tool that can accurately measure your body fat—all from the privacy and comfort of your own home. There's no need to schedule a Bod Pod or an expensive DEXA scan. Here's how it works:
- Click on the Body section of the Halo app.
- Use your phone's camera to take several shots from various angles.
- The app's machine learning compiles all those files and gives you a completed scan in about 30 seconds.
- You also get a personalized avatar to track bodily changes over time.
How accurate is it? It's twice as accurate as the smart scales you might have in your home that use bioimpedance, and it's definitely comparable to things like a Bod Pod or a DEXA scan. Also, very important: these images, just like the voice scans, can be deleted off your phone, and you can select that no backups are made and sent to the cloud.
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Other Important Features
Here are some other features you might enjoy that I also found really beneficial:
- No Screen: Amazon Halo does not have a screen, so its battery life can last up to a week.
- Water Resistant: You can take it in the shower, and it's water-resistant up to 50 meters, so you don't have to worry about being in a pool.
- Warranty: It comes with a one-year warranty.
- Price: As of making this video, it was $69.99 with a $3.99 monthly membership—much cheaper than almost every other fitness tracker I've personally tested. The first six months of that membership are free.
Final Thoughts
Personally, I think the Amazon Halo is going to be a home run. I really think it's going to be probably the biggest fitness tracker of 2021. It does everything I need it to, with the exception of a few things—it doesn't measure HRV (Heart Rate Variability) or respiration rate. But if you can get past this, it's really well made, super cheap, and introduces two very cool, very interesting features with Tone and body fat measurements. Its form and function most closely resemble Whoop, and you can bet your ass that I'll be doing a full review soon.
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