Amazon Halo: Shines as Activity and Sleep Tracker

Lots of fitness trackers can measure your calories burned, heart rate, and steps. With the Halo, Amazon wants to give you greater visibility into your overall health, along with actionable insights to help improve it. The Halo does an excellent job of monitoring your activity and sleep, and its companion app gives you access to a wide range of workouts and wellness programs. In addition, the Halo can analyze the tone of your voice to tell you how you sound to other people and measure your body-fat percentage based on images taken with its app. These two features are a bit gimmicky, but the Halo band is otherwise useful when you’re looking to move more and improve your shut-eye.

- ANGELA MOSCARITOLO

WHAT THE HALO DOES

The Amazon Halo has four main features: It tracks your activity, sleep, tone of voice, and body fat percentage. I’ll go over each of these features briefly here and in more detail below.

Throughout the day, the Halo automatically tracks the intensity and duration of your movement as well as your sedentary time. Taking these factors into account, it gives you an Activity Score. Informed by recommendations from the American Heart Association, the app encourages you to reach an Activity Score of at least 150 points each week. At night, it tracks your sleep, then gives you a sleep score from 0 to 100 based on the duration and quality of your rest.

The Tone feature uses two built-in microphones to collect voice data throughout the day, then analyzes your tone and reports how you sound to others. A live mode lets you view your voice analysis in real-time. A button on the sensor capsule lets you turn the microphones off at any time to disable this feature.

Amazon Halo

PROS

Unobtrusive design. Automatically tracks activities and workouts. Comprehensive sleep tracking. Features workouts and wellness programs.

CONS

Requires a subscription. No screen or smartwatch capabilities. Tone analysis feature drains battery life. Doesn’t track recovery.

BOTTOM LINE

The unassuming Amazon Halo wristband works with a membership-based wellness service that can help you get active and sleep better, but its tone of voice and body composition analysis features are a bit creepy.