Amazon is shutting down the division behind its short-lived Halo health tracking wearable.
The Halo Band and Halo View fitness bands and the Halo Rise wake up alarm products – none of which ever made it to the UK – have been discontinued by Amazon and removed from sale.
Furthermore, if you own one of these devices, the company will stop supporting the products on July 31 this year. If you bought a product in the last 12 months then you can get a refund, while subscriptions will also be refunded for the remainder of the term.
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“We continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Verge.
The statement continued: “We recently made the difficult decision to stop supporting Amazon Halo effective July 31, 2023. We are incredibly proud of the invention and hard work that went into building Halo on behalf of our customers, and our priorities are taking care of our customers and supporting our employees.”
In an internal email spied by the publication, Amazon cited the crowed sector and that old favourite “significant headwinds” when citing why it is closing down the division and laying off some of the staff.
The Halo band arrived in 2020 as one of the more controversial pieces of wearable technology we’ve seen. It had a Tone of voice analysis feature which used on-board microphones to analyse your speech to deem whether you’re experiencing high/low positivity and energy. The idea was to give people insight into how they might be being perceived.
This felt quite intrusive, but not as intrusive as the body fat feature which created a 3D model of the body based on four head to toe photos. Essentially it required users to upload photos of themselves to Amazon’s cloud services, which it promised to delete. When I reviewed the product in 2020, it required me to overlook a bit of a distrust on Amazon based on its user-privacy record with Alexa.
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