Amazon Halo is the online retail giant’s fitness service that is a bit controversial as it takes pictures and videos of you in order to assess, understand, and improve your health. The newest feature they’re adding to the Halo experience is something called Movement Health. Once again, it uses your camera for its computer vision technology as well as cloud-based artificial intelligence and machine learning to assess and analyze your basic movements and then give you a personalized program to correct what’s wrong or improve what you’re already doing right.
How it works is similar to the body fat scan that Halo does for you. The app will tell you how to set up your phone camera and then also instruct you on how to go through a series of five movements – single leg balances, forward lunges, overhead squats, overhead reaches, and feet-together squats. The Computer Vision together with the Machine Learning technology will evaluate your body position as you go through the movements and evaluate your stability, mobility, and posture.
You will get an overall score out of 100 and also details about the three aforementioned factors as well as a breakdown across four areas of your body – the trunk (your core), hips, lower body, and shoulders. After this evaluation, which they say is comparable to an in-person assessment, you will get a personalized program with corrective exercise videos that you can do in just 5-10 minutes. It is recommended you do them at least three days a week. You can then have an assessment again every 2-4 weeks to see if you’re making any gains.
There are some privacy concerns about how Halo may be putting the privacy of their users at risk since photos and videos are uploaded to the cloud server. But Amazon assures users that they have built-in multiple layers of privacy and security. The assessment videos are encrypted in transit to the cloud and after it’s processed in seconds, it will be automatically deleted. They say it’s only analyzed by algorithms and not human beings.
Unlike the body fat assessment, Movement Health is less invasive as you don’t have to be naked when doing your assessment. It will be available for Amazon Halo members in the next few weeks.
