Tech Brief: Amazon Announces Halo Fitness Subscription Service

• Retail behemoth Amazon has launched Halo, a health-focussed subscription service for US$ 3.99 a month, making it a new entrant into the wearable industry and a potential competitor to Fitbit (acquired by Google) and Apple Watch.
• In addition to tracking things like exercise and sleep, the fitness band (US$ 99) makes use of a microphone to listen to the wearers' tone of voice to predicate their mood, and comes with a companion app that captures a 3D scan of the body to calculate fat percentage.
• Using machine-learning-driven speech processing, the device intermittently records users' voice and analyses its tempo, rhythm, pitch, and intensity to make judgments about "the positivity and energy of your voice" where "positivity is measured by how happy or sad you sound, and energy is how excited or tired you sound."

• Although the photos taken of the body are uploaded to Amazon's servers, the company has said the data is deleted within 12 hours once the 3D scan is generated. It also reiterated the rest of the information such as the tone data is stored locally on the device, and that users' Halo profiles will remain separate from their Amazon accounts.
• The service, however, does share some anonymous aggregate information with third-parties with the aim of bringing additional services atop the Halo platform. Users can also optionally choose to upload information collected by the device to electronically manage their health records.
• Given the lack of regulation surrounding sensitive health data captured from fitness trackers, it's essential that necessary privacy safeguards are put in place to protect medial records irrespective of the platform. (Apple's HealthKit offers a similar mechanism for users to pull their own data from hospital networks, but it's limited only to those who use the iOS operating system. Amazon's Halo, in contrast, will be platform agnostic.)
• Privacy concerns notwithstanding, problems with using AI to assess mood still remain: Has it been tested across differing accents, gender, and cultures? These are complex systems that require massive, diverse datasets to be able to pull it off with a reasonable level of accuracy. Given Amazon Ring's contentious collaboration with law enforcement, it will be interesting to see how its latest healthcare bet plays out.