How Accurate Is The Amazon Halo Calorie Counter?

The Amazon Halo does many things, including measuring how many steps you take and how many calories you burn. How accurate is the Amazon Halo calories? 

I have been walking, jogging, and running with the Amazon Halo for a couple of years, and you can count on it to be reasonably accurate. 

Can Amazon Halo Track Calories?

Yes, Amazon Halo can do many things including estimate how many calories you burn each day. The Halo tracks your activity (including calories), body fat, tone of voice, and sleep quality. 

How Does Amazon Halo Calculate Calories Burned

The Amazon Halo can usually tell what you are doing based on your wrist movements. If you are walking, jogging, or running, your wrists will move in a certain way, and the Amazon Halo’s accelerometer will detect this. 

It will then estimate how many calories you burn from the amount of physical activity you do. 

How Accurate is Amazon Halo Calories?

Estimating calories burned from wrist movement works better than you might assume it would, so fitness trackers including the Halo are pretty accurate. If you wear more than one fitness tracker at once, the different trackers report similar results. 

The Halo, Fitbit, and Apple Watch report roughly the same number of calories burned for the same activity. There might be a difference of 50 calories, but the technology is good enough that results are remarkably consistent. 

Fitness trackers can tell the difference between high-intensity and low-intensity activity and estimate how many calories you burn for each minute of each activity. 

Another thing fitness trackers rely on is heart rate. The faster your heart is beating, the more calories you are burning. A fitness tracker also estimates your base metabolic rate from the information you give it. 

How Accurate is the Heart Rate Tracker?

Both the Amazon Halo View and the Apple Watch Series 7 have fairly accurate heart rate trackers. The two will usually report a very similar number of beats per minute. 

Sometimes, during intense exercise, they can report a significantly different maximum rate. This must lead to the trackers counting calories inaccurately in some cases.

However, the heart rate and calorie trackers are still good enough for health and fitness purposes. If you increase the number of calories you burn or increase the maximum heart rate you can reach during a workout, your Halo will report that. 

How Accurate is Amazon Halo Body Fat?

Studies show that the Amazon Halo measures body fat accurately. To measure your body fat, you take four pictures of yourself with your phone camera. Amazon’s AI then turns the four images into a 3D model and uses the model to estimate your body fat. 

It makes more sense to say that some people are overfat than some people are overweight. If a person is overweight according to their weight and height, they could still be very healthy if their body fat is reasonably low. A person who is healthy according to their weight and height might still be overfat if their body fat is too high. 

For people in their twenties and thirties, women should have 21% to 32% body fat, and men should have 8% to 19%. For people in their forties and fifties, women should have 23% to 33%, and men should have 11% to 21%. 

How Do Doctors Measure Body Fat?

The best way is a DEXA scan or dual x-ray absorptiometry scan. This uses X-rays to measure how much muscle/fat/bone you have. This is the best method, and you can test other methods by comparing their results to a DEXA scan results. 

Some other common methods include:

• Skin calipers:  a doctor can use calipers to measure your skinfold thickness. This can be accurate, but only if they do the technique right. 
• Underwater weighing:  Since fat floats and other weight sinks, you can weigh someone underwater to see how much of their weight is fat. This works, but the equipment is not common.
• A body pad: This is similar to underwater weighing, but uses a pad that measures how much air you displace. 
• Bioelectrical impedance: which estimates fat by the speed at which electrical signals move through your body. This is cheap and convenient, but many factors can potentially reduce the accuracy. 

How Well Does the Halo Body Scan Work?

A study involving more than 100 participants plus sleep labs, doctors, and technicians found that the Halo works better than any other method besides a DEXA scan. The AI is quite sophisticated and can look at how much fat there appears to be on specific parts of the body. 

What if the Halo is Giving Wrong Information?

Sometimes, your Amazon Halo might be displaying blatantly wrong information that could not be right. In that case, you need to recalibrate it. Go through the following steps: 

• First, unpair the device. Go to Bluetooth settings and then tap either unpair or forget this device. 
• Then, open the Halo app and tap settings. Go to devices, select the Halo, and select deregister. 
• Then, press the button on the Halo band twice. When you press it the second time, hold the button down. The light should blink purple. Then, log in and set the Halo up.

After you do all that, the Halo should work properly again and estimate the number of calories you burn more accurately. 

Is The Halo Tracker Always Accurate?

The step tracker is probably not very accurate for most people. It can easily count too many steps or too few. This is because it uses wrist movement to estimate how many steps you take. 

If you are not walking but are moving your wrists, the Halo might think you are taking steps. If you are walking but not moving your wrists enough, it may not count the steps. It must be less accurate for some people than others. 

However, even the step tracker gives a half-decent estimate of the number of steps you take. If you compare the Halo to the Apple Watch, there may be less than a 10% difference between the number of steps the two devices measure. 

Amazon Halo Sleep Tracker vs Apple Watch Sleep Tracker

In my experience, the Halo notices when you fall asleep and the Apple Watch believes you fall asleep faster than you do. The Halo can differentiate between lying there falling asleep and sleeping, the Apple Watch has trouble with this. 

Key Takeaways

• Your Amazon Halo can track many things, including how many calories you burn each day. It can tell when you are running or walking by your wrist movement and use that to estimate the number of calories you burn. 
• Estimating calories burned from wrist movement is surprisingly effective. When people walk or run, their wrists move in a certain way, and the Halo can accurately detect this. Different fitness trackers report similar results because they all fairly accurately measure calories. 
• The Halo body scan for measuring body fat is also accurate. Research proves that it is more accurate than most but not all methods doctors use.