Amazon Halo tracks heart rate, body composition, and more but comes with monthly fee

Over at our sister site 9to5Toys, we get our first look at the Amazon Halo fitness tracker that was announced earlier today.

Amazon has dabbled in the wearables market before with the Echo Loop, but it was mainly to access Alexa for adding reminders to a shopping list or control Alexa enabled devices. Amazon Halo is purely a health and fitness device.

“Health is much more than just the number of steps you take in a day or how many hours you sleep. Amazon Halo combines the latest medical science, highly accurate data via the Halo Band sensors, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence to offer a more comprehensive approach to improving your health and wellness.”

Dr. Maulik Majmudar of Amazon

Halo requires a $3.99 monthly membership fee to use all of its features. The benefits of the membership include body composition, tone of voice analysis, sleep & activity tracking, and more. Halo’s body composition measures body fat percentage vs just relying on your weight alone to track overall health. Without membership, Halo can track basic sleep time, heart rate, and step tracking.

Amazon Halo is currently in early access on Amazon and is available for $64.99 for now. It will be $99 after early access expires. While the purchase price makes it an extremely attractive fitness and health tracker, time will tell if the $3.99 monthly fee will turn consumers away or give them enough actionable data that it’s viewed as a great value.

One unknown is if it will have any sort of integration with other connected fitness tools. Nothing in the release information mentions ANT+ support for the heart rate tracking. ANT+ support would be required for integration with Peloton.