Amazon
Amazon today continued its reach in health and fitness hardware by announcing a health tracker coming this winter. With a color display, the Halo View can compete with competitors like Fitbit by displaying real-time health stats, including heart rate and blood oxygen levels.
The Halo View is Amazon’s second Halo fitness tracker. The Halo Band announced in 2020 offers similar features, but no screen. The Halo View stands out with a display made with AMOLED, a type of OLED known for even higher contrast and greater flexibility. This display can show your sleep scores, track your workouts and alert you with haptic feedback if you have a text message or if you’ve been gone too long without moving.
Amazon Halo Band in Silver.
The device works with the help of sensors, namely a skin temperature sensor, accelerometer and optical sensor for measuring your heart rate and blood oxygen.
If all that surveillance sounds creepy to you, note that Amazon claims that there are “multiple” layers of privacy and security built into the hardware. According to Amazon’s announcement, “all Halo health data is encrypted in the cloud in transit and at rest, and customers can download or delete their Halo health data directly from the Halo app at any time.” Locally, you can require that you enter a PIN before you can view health data on the Halo View.
Amazon
Amazon claims the Halo View lasts up to seven days before needing a recharge, which can be completed in “less than 90 minutes”.
The Halo View will be available “in time for the holidays” for $79.99 in Active Black, Sage Green, and Lavender Dream. There will also be sport, cloth, leather and metal straps for sale for extra.
As part of Amazon’s growing health and fitness efforts, the Halo View comes with a one-year subscription to Amazon’s Halo service, which includes fitness videos. “By integrating with Halo View or Halo Band, members can see real-time fitness stats such as heart rate and heart rate intensity zone as an overlay on the display, allowing them to train smarter and optimize every workout,” Amazon said in today’s announcement. †
Amazon
In January, Halo will also include Halo Nutrition, featuring recipes and personalized meal planning tools. Halo Nutrition also allows you to add groceries to an Amazon Alexa Shopping list.
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Listing image by Amazon