Fitness trackers provide useful information to help you change how you approach your health. The Amazon Halo comes with a mix of classic features alongside its new tone and body fat scans. However, these come with notable privacy concerns.

Health needs differ from person to person, but we'll explore if it's worth strapping on your own Amazon Halo band, and exactly what it can do for you.

Getting Started With the Amazon Halo Band

When unboxing the Amazon Halo, it comes with its band already attached, a charging clip, and a set-up manual. Since the Halo doesn't have a screen, you'll need a phone able to fulfill these requirements to view your data:

• Make sure your phone is either Android 7.0+ or iOS 12.0+
• Download the Amazon Halo app
• Enable Bluetooth (Halo uses Bluetooth 5.0)

The charging clip uses standard USB-A, so you'll need to attach it to a suitable charger (not supplied). When placing the Halo inside the charging clip, make sure to place it with the button facing outward. You'll also need to make sure the pins on the underside of the Halo line up with the pins on the charger.

The one LED light on the Halo will begin to flash white. This means you're able to pair your device via the app. As you follow the on-screen prompts, the Halo gathers a bit of information on you to get started on your health tracking journey.

Wearing the Amazon Halo Band

For those after an unobtrusive fitness tracker, the Halo delivers on that. Since there's no screen, there's very little to distract. LED lights are used sparingly, so you don't have to account for any unwelcome disturbances.

The Halo comes in two band types: fabric and sport. Its default fabric band is composed of spandex, nylon, and polyester. Whereas the sport band is made from silicone rubber.

For those looking for a more breathable material at the wrist, the Halo sports band variant was preferable. However, the silicone material did make it much more of a chore to securely attach the sensor capsule. Between early access and release, the sport band's price also rose from $15.99 to $24.99 unexpectedly.

With that said, the default fabric band is easy to use and fits snuggly on your wrist. Since band and sensor together weigh under a pound, it was easy to forget the Amazon Halo was there at times.

Measuring Your Activity

To measure your activities, the Amazon Halo awards you points based on the intensity and timing of your movements. For tracking purposes, Amazon has opted to go with a 150 point weekly goal based on data from the American Heart Association and other medical resources.

While you can manually add activities in the Halo app, the fitness band automatically tracks activities that elevate your heart rate to moderate or intense levels for 10 minutes or more. However, it only automatically recognizes walking and running. Other activities will just appear as "Activity" with their duration, but you can edit the entry later to identify what it was.

Like other trackers, the Halo focuses a lot on getting your heart rate going, but it does support smaller build-up. For light activities like walking, you can earn one point for every twenty minutes. However, if you run short of that you won't receive the points at all.

The Halo also addresses if you spend too much time being sedentary. If you exceed eight hours of sedentary time, you'll lose a point for every hour past that.

While there's plenty of metrics to break down, the bottom line is whether you want to crunch data or track your progress, the Halo provides a fine balance for either party.

Sleep Tracking? How Accurate Is It?

As you sleep while wearing the Halo Band, it collects a variety of data on how you sleep. When you wake up, it calculates a sleep score from the following:

• Total sleep time
• The time it took to fall asleep
• Time spent in each stage of sleep
• How often you were awake

Your sleep score will range between 0 and 100 with an 85 or above being a good night's sleep. You can also view your personalized hypnogram that visualizes your sleep stages. If you have any disturbances or if you want to see your sleep temperature, they're listed under the sleep quality category.

As for how accurate the results are, the Halo app suggests you go by your own experience. If it doesn't match up, it suggests you adjust your fitness band, check your environment, and make sure you're not sleeping directly on top of it. During testing, I never ran into any issues besides a small delay in my temperature registering within the app.

Health Goals With Labs

A major part of the Halo experience is suggesting improvements for your health. As such, numerous companies have included their content on the Halo such as Orangetheory, 8fit, Weightwatchers, and Headspace. Under the Labs section, you have the option to view workouts or look at programs within the app.

In using it, thanks to the categories and filters, it’s very easy to find content that suits your level of readiness. Whether you’re after activities, self-improvements, or goal-setting there’s a lot available.

For those concerned about keeping on track, you can set timed reminders. The Halo app also keeps a personal tab for you to view all in-progress and completed labs.

Amazon Halo Band's Tone Tracking

The first of Amazon Halo's controversial features is Tone. This feature allows you to see how you sound to others. As a preface, this is an entirely opt-in portion of the Halo app.

It requires you to create a voice ID by reading six classic literature passages. If you don't create a voice ID or delete it, the Halo won't be able to use its microphones to record you. If you want to mute or disable your microphones, you just have to hold down the button for three seconds and the LED will turn red.

As another safety measure, the microphone recordings never go to the cloud. It's immediately processed, analyzed, and deleted. So you won't be able to playback or download anything.

With privacy concerns addressed, let's look at how Tone analyzes your voice. The results are broken down into four categories:

• Amused, delighted, excited - yellow (medium to high energy and positivity)
• Content, appreciative, caring - green (medium to high positivity and low energy)
• Reserved, discouraged, worried - blue-gray (low positivity and energy)
• Displeased, irritated, enraged - red ( low positivity, high to medium energy)

Throughout the day, Amazon Halo will analyze your phrases, assign tone values, and list any notable moments.

You can also use the band button directly to begin the analysis. After pressing the button once, the microphone will continue analyzing for up to thirty minutes or if it detects the conversation is over. If you access the live portion of the Halo app, you can also view a live visual analysis of your tone.

Battery Life and Halo's Tone

If you're using the tone feature of the Amazon Halo, there's a battery life trade-off. With the Halo band mic muted, you can use the Halo for up to seven days (on average) without a recharge. However, if it's on then that battery life drops to one or two days depending on how much tone analysis you want.

If you opt for the less tone setting, your Halo will last two days. For the more tone setting, it'll last only one day.

While tone does drain the battery life quickly, the Amazon Halo can charge back to full in ninety minutes. Still, if you're not a fan of frequent charging keep this in mind.

Amazon Halo Band's Body Scans

Besides Tone, another controversial feature is the body portion of the app. The Halo uses your smartphone’s camera to analyze your body fat percentage. To combat concerns, Amazon makes it clear the images are sent to the cloud for processing then a 3D body model is created.

Afterward, it’s deleted and stored locally within the app unless you choose otherwise. Regardless, not everyone is going to want to do this. You can delete your body data or opt to take a more clothed scan instead.

So how does it work?

Once you have your cellphone positioned and your whole body is in the frame, the Halo has you position your arms and feet for a scan. It takes about ten seconds, so you’ll have your results in under a minute.

It's mostly seamless, but you may run into some issues with the app not registering the positioning of your arms correctly and not starting the scan. In a wide-open space with plenty of natural light, this was less of an issue.

How Accurate Is Halo's Body Scans

I tested the body scan over several weeks and in different sets of clothing. Even in ideal conditions (same location, lighting, minimal clothing, hair tied up), I noticed inconsistencies with the results and outlier readings.

In more form-fitting clothing like athletic wear, I got fairly similar results to when I was in the most minimal clothing (within 1 to 2% typically) but the chance of an odd outlier reading did increase. So while minimal clothing is best, the difference didn’t feel enough for me.

If you want to use these scans as a snapshot, it can be useful for charting trends or progress. While it's an interesting concept for at-home medical screening, I wouldn't suggest you ditch the scale to adopt this alone.

Amazon Halo Membership

The Amazon Halo band comes with six months of free membership. After this, you'll be charged $3.99 per month (plus tax). If you cancel your membership, however, you'll lose access to all but the basic functions. Non-members lose access to the following features:

• Body
• Tone
• Activity score
• Activity intensity
• Sleep score
• Sleep stages
• Insights

You'll also only retain limited access to the Halo's labs.

Should You Buy the Amazon Halo Band?

The Amazon Halo offers a lot to those just getting interested in fitness bands or looking for a distraction-free tracker. With its included six-month membership, it's also difficult to argue against the value it offers upfront.

Still, with its more controversial features, you have to make a personal call.