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."