Tech giant Amazon has just announced its new wearable, which focuses on monitoring users’ health through microphones, heart rate sensors, and temperature sensors with a variety of novel features. The Halo band is incorporated with an Amazon app that gives users information on their activity and wellness, including sleep stages and body fat percentage with the latter metric being determined using computer vision. The Halo also includes an algorithm to assess a user’s emotional state through the sound of their voice, letting them know if they seem stressed or happy in real-time by listening to their speech. This technology would be the first of its kind on a consumer wearable and demonstrates Amazon’s strength in integrating on-device computing with cloud-based services.

Interestingly, Amazon does not have any patents in consumer sleep technology, nor has it acquired any related wearables companies in the past few years; this suggests that the corporation is licensing technology from other sources. Despite this, Amazon is clearly making efforts to differentiate itself by leveraging its capital and web infrastructure even as it enters a market that is already dominated by companies with strong patent portfolios such as Fitbit (now owned by Google), Samsung, and Apple. You can view their patents and more on the Consumer Sleep Technology Patent Radian®.