Amazon cares about your well-being with Halo

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Amazon recently announced the launch of an app it calls Amazon Halo. Like its Google-owned competitors Apple Watch and FitBit, Halo measures things like activity, sleep, and other health metrics. However, it does much more.

monitoring of body fat and emotional state

According to Amazon, its app can measure your body fat percentage just through photos. Using the full body selfies you submit, Halo is able to create a “3D body model” that he recommends redoing every two weeks. This measurement will also tell you the state of your body fat compared to other people of your gender and age according to “medical literature”. You can also “visualize” what you would look like with more or less body fat.

The second thing about Halo is that it measures your tone of voice to help you in your interactions with others. By creating a “voice profile”, Halo can recognize you when you speak. The app will then take short samples of your speech throughout the day to analyze their acoustic characteristics. Thanks to this, Halo shows you your emotional state in your social relationships. You can also choose “continuous tone analysis” for a conversation of up to 30 minutes.

Halo also measures other points like your skin temperature, movement and heart rate. As such, Amazon’s main argument is that a better understanding of your health allows you to improve it.

Privacy on the scales

Amazon insists Halo respects privacy. The data would indeed be encrypted as it flows between your device and your smartphone, and you can download and delete the data stored by your Halo at any time.

Additionally, the company claims that the most sensitive data (like your voice recordings) never leaves your device and is erased immediately after processing. Likewise, Body Scan images are supposed to be deleted from Amazon’s cloud after processing, and can only be accessed live on your device.

Amazon has been making inroads into the healthcare industry for quite some time. It already analyzes and stores health data for hospitals, for example. Regardless, Halo’s privacy policy is not clear on what it will do with the data collected.

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