Amazon’s Halo fitness service will soon let you use your smartphone’s camera and some cloud-based AI to scan of your “Movement Health.” After a session taking 5-10 minutes where you put yourself into different poses for the camera, Amazon’s servers will analyze the video and use it to create a customized workout routine to improve your “stability, mobility, and posture.” The service is expected to launch “in the coming weeks.”
Amazon says that’s just like that’s the case with Halo’s body fat scan, the data is only analyzed only by the algorithms rather than humans, and is then promptly deleted both from the cloud and from your phone. While in transit, the videos are encrypted and also when they’re (briefly) at rest in Amazon’s cloud.
The resulting readout will break down the mobility of your body in terms of percentages. Amazon then uses those percentages to create a “personalized program of corrective exercise videos” that are designed to improve your mobility. Amazon said that Halo will offer users 5-1 videos that will range from simple stretches to full workouts specific to their needs.
The Halo fitness band isn’t used in any particular way during the scan.
“We take responsibility to ensure that our algorithms deliver comparable performance across demographics and body types and we extensively test different dimensions across things like body types, different ethnicity groups, a number of different demographic dimensions,” according to Njenga Kariuki, senior technical product manager for Amazon Halo.
Amazon launched Halo last August, offering it for $99.99 and a $3.99 / month health subscription service.