Introducing Amazon Halo
In my time at Amazon, I’ve always been inspired by our ongoing endeavor to build a better future together with our customers. Today, I’m excited to introduce a new way to help people build not just a better future, but a healthier one: our consumer health membership, Amazon Halo.
Halo is a new service designed to help you continually improve your individual health and wellness through better understanding it. That means we provide not just useful information, but also ways to put that information into action. Halo takes activity and sleep tracking a step further, plus introduces innovative new tools like body composition measurement, tone of voice analysis, and expert-backed habit “labs.” You can learn more about Halo’s features here.
Why Halo and why now? Our approach to health and wellness is rooted in a few core ideas: that health is comprehensive, that the journey to improve is ongoing (both for our community and for us), and that the journey should feel good along the way. We are also inspired by the idea of the Halo effect, and believe that even one simple action to care for ourselves can make everything around us a bit better. We never fathomed we would begin this journey during a global health pandemic, but the past six months have only accelerated our mission to help customers improve their individual health.
Another one of the core values of Halo is honesty. That means we are going to be honest with you about your health metrics — even when it’s a little uncomfortable — but we’ll suggest the next step you can take to keep you moving forward. We’re also going to be honest about the areas we need to improve, like increasing personalization and continuing to best our own accuracy benchmarks. Most importantly, we will make it easy for you to protect and control your health data.
We don’t (and will never) presume to be the ultimate authority on your health and wellness. We do have trusted medical experts on the team, and our service is science-backed all the way. But our deep expertise at Amazon is in artificial intelligence, computer vision (CV), and machine learning (ML), and we see an opportunity to innovate and apply our technical know-how to the health and wellness space, and to help people move the needle and realize their goals.
For example: Body fat percentage isn’t a new metric, but being able to accurately measure it from the comfort and privacy of your home certainly is. This feature required significant innovation in CV and ML, along with the latest medical science — it’s one of the first features we started developing years ago, and even though it’s already as accurate as methods a doctor would use, we’re constantly working to make it better (you can learn more about this feature here). We believe that you shouldn’t need an expensive appointment in a special facility or doctor’s office to get access to important, clinically relevant information about your own health; nor should you settle for existing in-home solutions that are inaccurate. Halo is the perfect blend of our technical innovation, in-house medical expertise, and customer obsession.
We started this work driven by the belief that building a healthier future through improving individual health and wellness is an important — perhaps the most important — journey we could embark on. The past six months have only accelerated our commitment to that purpose. Wherever you are in your health journey, we hope to take the next step with you to make every day better.
If you’d like to request early access to Amazon Halo, click here and as we like to say: Be well.
Melissa Cha is Vice President of Amazon Halo. Her wellness goal right now is to get her first 90+ sleep score.
