That project is now personified by today’s announcement of Halo Rise, the $140 “contactless sleep tracker, smart alarm clock, and wake-up light” that picks up signals from your bedroom that even the partner sleeping next to you doesn’t notice. (To make the most of that data to improve sleep, users must subscribe to the premium Halo app; the first six months are free.) Amazon was already in the popular sleep-tracking game with its wearable Halo wristband, but one special radar-equipped device is enough to cause stress-breathing anomalies in its critics. I asked Limp if there had been any hesitation in developing a product that seems so intimate. Weren’t Seattle executives wary of releasing a product that would make people say, “WTF, Amazon is using radar to track my sleep?”
The answer was no. Like any other Amazon product, Halo Rise was first introduced via a six-page pitch document outlining a press release for its future launch. “Amazon is built on customer trust — it’s not ‘What would an expert think?’” says Limp. Amazon was already working with low-power sensors, in this case radar, and found that without ever touching anything, you could get a very accurate signal of someone’s breathing and translate that into sleep. “So how do you do that in a safe and private way?” he says. “We chose not to add a camera, nor did we need a microphone. Let’s make sure the data is encrypted, both in transit and at rest.”
Amazon’s director of new products, Michael Fisher, says the Halo Rise has other safety features, such as the push of a button that turns off the monitoring. All data will be erased from the cloud after 10 days. Amazon has even factored in concerns that its perceptive little drive could take note of nocturnal ruminations. When a designated sleeper’s breathing pattern indicates that some nighttime music is going on, it cools its sensors until a sleep pattern develops — the same silent treatment it uses when the person reads or watches TV, activities Amazon says characterize their own. have breathing patterns that Halo Rise does not follow. “The device aims to recognize that you are sleeping,” Fisher says.
Of course, it’s hard to think that the Halo Rise will achieve the ubiquity of popular Alexa devices like Echo or Dot. Perhaps it will go the way of the Ring Always Home Cam, the in-home multi-camera security drone announced by Amazon in 2020 that has yet to ship. But regardless of whether people choose to retire and wake up with Amazon’s weird new sleep monitor, the company is fixated on producing and improving hardware to fill your environment with Amazon sensors, cameras, microphones, and AI. all done in a way you barely know it’s there.
And by the way, Limp says Amazon’s home patrol drone isn’t dead. Hundreds of test prototypes are already in homes, he says, gathering data that will help the company perfect the device. “I still believe in the product,” he says. At Amazon, ambient intelligence seems to know no boundaries.
Updated 9/28/2022, 5:20 PM EDT: The Astro robot can detect and capture video pets when it encounters them, not finding them active.
