Amazon Halo Band fitness tracker can calculate your body fat but requires your semi-nude picture

Amazon is getting into the wearable gadget market with a new smart band that goes way beyond regular fitness and activity tracking. The Amazon Halo Band is a fitness wristband that gathers and analyses data using AI to provide users with feedback pertaining to their mental and physical health.

Unlike regular smart bands and smartwatches, the Amazon Halo Band does not have a screen. The app that comes along with the band sports the usual tracking features along with two unusual ones that use your camera to create 3D scans for body fat and gauge your emotional state by listening to the sound of your voice.

The Halo fitness tracker promises to improve your health by monitoring your body fat percentage through a feature known as 'Body'. The health experts responsible for Halo claim that calculating body fat is a more effective indicator for health as opposed to just checking your weight and height. However, the one catch here is that you will have to send the company semi-nude pictures of yourself to get accurate measurements.

Amazon Halo's principal medical officer, Dr Maulik Majmudar, wrote in a blog post, "At Amazon, we believe everyone should have access to important, clinically relevant information about their own health. So, we applied our long-term expertise in computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) towards developing "Body," a feature within Amazon Halo, our new health and wellness membership. With Body, you can easily measure and track your BFP from the comfort and privacy of your own home, using only your smartphone's camera and the Amazon Halo app."

The other unusual feature on Halo is called 'Tone'. Tone measures your level of stress by listening to your voice. Amazon recommends that you keep this feature activated throughout the day to get the best out of it. Tone uses the microphone on the fitness tracker to record short samples on your speech to measure if you are sad, happy, stressed, etc. You can turn off the microphone at any time by pressing a button on the band.

Amazon's Halo Band is priced at USD 99.99 (Roughly Rs 7,350), while the service costs USD 3.99 per month. The service is required to access Halo's more advanced features. Amazon has initiated an invite-only early access programme with an introductory price of USD 64.99 (Roughly Rs 4,770), which will include a six-month free membership for the service. Amazon's Halo service is not bundled with Prime and will be sold as a separate offering. The Amazon Halo app will work on all Android and iOS smartphones.