They bear a resemblance to the work of renowned therapist John Gottman, who observed couples and developed a coding system to rate their positive or negative behaviors with each other.īut Gottman’s research goes a lot deeper than the Halo. The Halo’s emotional rating system of colored smiley faces is not without precedent. It made me wonder … if I actually am getting irritable, what the heck am I supposed to do with this data? I decided to find out. After two weeks with my nuclear family in the claustrophobic confines of our home without childcare help, parties, or any rest, the Halo began registering voice tones it flagged as increasingly irritable. I wore the wristband through a stressful pandemic holiday with two small children. Despite these complaints, the Halo's voice-tone tracking feature intrigued me. I'm not the only one who thinks so the requests for underwear photos and the on-device mic have raised many privacy concerns. I’m not sure it’s a great idea for any company, let alone Amazon, to normalize the process of full-body strip-down scans for its customers. In fact, I've also found that most of the data the Halo does analyze doesn’t seem worth the hassle of collecting it. I’ve worn the Halo for a month, and it lacks a lot of features I'd want in a fitness tracker, like GPS for tracking your runs.

Also, the Halo's microphone records snippets of your conversations to interpret the emotions conveyed in the tone of your speaking voice. Most notably, the app analyzes pictures of you in your undies to measure your body fat percentage.

Unlike many fitness trackers that simply count your steps, the Halo collects additional health data that is shockingly intimate. Amazon’s new health tracker, the Halo, is a small, display-free device fitted into a fabric band that you wear on your wrist.

Amazon halo