Amazon Halo View tracks your health on an OLED screen

Amazon continued its reach into health and fitness hardware today by announcing a health tracker coming out this winter. With a color display, the Halo View can compete with competitors like Fitbit by displaying real-time health metrics, including heart rate and blood oxygen levels.

The Halo View is Amazon’s second Halo-branded fitness tracker. The Halo Band announced in 2020 offers similar features but doesn’t have a screen. The Halo View stands out with a display made with AMOLED, a type of OLED known for even higher contrast and more flexibility. This display can show your sleep scores, track your workouts, and alert you with haptic feedback if you have a text or if you’ve gone too long since without moving around.

The device works with the help of sensors, namely a skin-temperature sensor, accelerometer, and optical sensor for monitoring your heart rate and blood oxygen.

If all that monitoring sounds creepy to you, note that Amazon claims there are “multiple” privacy and security layers integrated in the hardware. According to Amazon’s announcement, “all Halo health data is encrypted in transit and at rest in the cloud, and customers can download or delete their Halo health data at any time directly from the Halo app.” Locally, you can make it so you have to enter a PIN before viewing any health data on the Halo View.

Amazon claims the Halo View will last for up to seven days before it needs a charge, which can complete in “under 90 minutes.”

The Halo View will be available “in time for the holidays” for $79.99 in Active Black, Sage Green, and Lavender Dream. There will also be sports, fabric, leather, and metal bands on sale for extra.

As part of Amazon’s growing health and fitness efforts, the Halo View comes with a one-year subscription to Amazon’s Halo service, which includes fitness videos. “Integration with Halo View or Halo Band allows members to see real-time fitness metrics, such as heart rate and heart rate intensity zone as an on-display overlay, so they can train smarter and optimize every workout,” Amazon said in today’s announcement.

In January, Halo will also include Halo Nutrition, which will have recipes and personalized meal-planning tools. Halo Nutrition will also let you add groceries to an Amazon Alexa Shopping list.

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Listing image by Amazon