At Amazon Halo, we’re always looking for new ways to help you understand and improve your health, combining our expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision (CV), and machine learning (ML) with the work of experts from across the wellness world. That’s why today, we are excited to announce our newest feature addition to the Halo experience: Movement Health.
What is Movement Health?
Movement Health is based on functional fitness, which is your body’s readiness to execute the everyday movements you do without thinking—bending, reaching, lifting, twisting, pulling, pushing, and even just walking. Good movement health is essential in order to perform basic movements like carrying groceries, reaching for something from the top shelf, lifting up your child, picking something up from the floor, or more intense activities such as running. Because it’s so woven into our everyday life, our movement health is easy to take for granted—but if we don’t maintain it, simple and routine movement can create problems, like looking behind you and getting seized by sudden neck or shoulder pain. Professional athletes pay close attention to their movement health in order to maximize their performance and accelerate recovery, but it’s a useful and important part of everyone’s wellness—no matter your level of activity.
How does it work?
It all starts with a short assessment. The Halo app will walk you through setting up your phone camera, and then guide you through a series of five simple movements—single leg balances, forward lunges, overhead squats, overhead reaches, and feet-together squats. As you go through these exercises, Halo’s CV/ML technology evaluates your body position to identify limitations in your stability, mobility, and posture. Following the assessment, you get an overall Movement score out of 100, details about your stability, mobility, and posture, and a breakdown across four areas of the body—the trunk (your core), hips, lower body, and shoulders. This assessment delivers comparable accuracy to an in-person assessment with a professional trainer, and takes less than 10 minutes.
But it doesn’t stop there, because understanding your health is only half the battle. To help you take action to improve your movement health, Halo will provide a personalized program of corrective exercise videos to help you improve in the specific areas you need it most—things like stretching, balancing, breathing, and more. Each set of corrective exercises can be completed in just 5-10 minutes. We recommend you do them at least three days a week, and assess your movement every 2-4 weeks to monitor your improvement. The exercises also include guided instruction from Dr. Kelly Starrett, a renowned physical therapist and leader in movement health and human performance who has worked with Olympians and professional athletes from the worlds of football, basketball, soccer, cycling, and more. Our team of scientists and fitness experts partnered with Dr. Starrett to develop the Halo Movement Health feature, to ensure we could provide as close an experience of to an in-person assessment as possible.
In each video, Dr. Starrett demonstrates how to do each movement correctly and provides modification options. These low-impact exercises can be easily incorporated to complement your own fitness routine and, if followed correctly, result in overall score improvement that you can track as you move forward. And, if you’re looking for a little extra burn, you can also see an additional curated list of workout recommendations to provide a higher-intensity alternative.
"Movement is the foundation of our physical experience in the world—it has a huge impact on your quality of life, and it’s time we started making it more of a focus,” said Dr. Starrett. “This feature is a game changer. It replicates the experience of a professional assessment—putting the expertise of a trained coach's eye right in your Halo app, providing a highly accurate assessment on the state of your movement health. Halo then provides targeted, easy-to-perform exercises and resources that will help improve your ability to move more freely and effortlessly in your daily life."
Privacy by design
As with all Halo features, Movement Health was built with privacy in mind, and multiple layers of privacy and security are built into the service to keep data safe and in your control. Movement assessment videos are encrypted in transit to the cloud, securely processed within seconds, and then automatically deleted. No one, including you, ever sees them. Learn more about privacy and security for Amazon Halo and Movement Health.
Get moving
We’re excited to share this new feature. Whether you are just starting on your health journey, or preparing for your next triathlon, HIIT workout, or strength-training session, we hope that Amazon Halo and Movement Health helps you reach your goals—on your terms.
The Movement Health feature will be available to Halo members in the coming weeks via the Halo app. Be well.
