Amazon has introduced a brand new wristband, ‘Halo,’ on Thursday. This new product is slightly different from the fitness bands present in the market. The new Halo wristbands are equipped with the simple tracking activity of the traditional bands and also find out how happy the user is. The level of happiness is detected by the tone of the user. According to reports, this wristband, equipped with artificial intelligence tools and several advanced sensors, combine the collected data and accordingly give the user feedback about his/her physical and mental health.
Despite the increase in digital health services and devices over the past decade, we did not see an improvement in the health of the American people, said Dr. Maulik Mazmudar, Principal Medical Officer, Amazon Halo. So we are using Amazon’s deep expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning, he added.
The company said that – Americans would get the first opportunity to use Amazon Halo. Halo is priced at $ 65 (about Rs 5,790), including a six-month membership of AI-powered analytics for a limited time. After the fixed period is over, the device will cost $ 99.99 (about Rs 7,350), and the monthly membership will cost $ 4 (about Rs 295).
The Halo Band
Amazon’s new water-resistant Halo band consists of an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, two microphones, a heart rate monitor, a button to turn the microphones on or off, and an LED indicator light. It lacks a display screen, so if you need to check your steps or time, you will need to check your phone. Notably, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is absent despite having two microphones. It is connected to your phone via Bluetooth and should work equally well for both android and iPhones.
Body Scans
The Halo Band comes with a feature called “Body” that applies Amazon’s computer vision technology to wellness. It guides you into taking pictures of your body(front, back, and both sides) and uploads them on Amazon’s server, where it is combined into a three-dimensional body model for measuring body fat percentage. The data is then deleted from Amazon’s servers. Finally, when you are done with the body scan, the app gives you a slider to adjust your body fat percentage and shows how you might look in turn.
The tone of Your Voice
The tone feature of Amazon’s Halo band stands unique to all its other features. The microphones measure facets of voice like rhythm, speed, pitch, and intensity to build an idea about your mood based on how others react to it.
Once you opt in, you will need to read back some quotes so that it can train a model on your voice. This allows the Halo Band to key in on your tone and helps it distinguish your voice from others. After that, Tone runs in the background and will intermittently listen to your voice for irregular updates.
Amazon makes sure that your voice is neither uploaded to any servers nor heard by any human being in the world. The audio snippets are instead sent to your phone via Bluetooth and are analyzed there.
According to Amazon Halo principal medical officer, Dr. Maulik Majumder, “The tone feature supplements traditional metrics like sleep and activity by helping you realize how you sound to others.” The Halo Band analyzes the energy and positivity of your voice by using machine learning.
Data Privacy
In order to protect privacy, the speech samples are analyzed on the user’s smartphone, which is in sync with the halo wristbands, and then deleted after the process is completed. Users can also turn off the Halo microphone when it is not working. Moreover, the data present in the cloud can be deleted by the user anytime.
The Verdict
The Tone feature that is detecting and identifying one’s emotion using voice AI is not a new concept. It was introduced much before by car companies. It suggested a driver pull over if they sounded very tired. But even if it is capable of doing everything that Amazon claims, the question remains, why should someone use this. People are well able to identify their moods without quantifying their vocal excitement. However, it will be useful to neurodiverse people to improve their communication skills.
