Amazon’s new health band is the most invasive tech we’ve ever tested

"Invasive" matters little when so few will likely buy such a half-baked product. $100 while Amazon tries to tweek the algorithms to make this actually work? Meh, experiment on someone else's dime, Amazon. That whole voice analysis thing, as described, sounds like some half-assed version of Eliza. I'm skeptical enough of the body fat readings one might get from a weight scale, so it's going to take some convincing (which TFA does not do) to get me to believe body fat % can be deduced from photos of me in my underwear.

But on top of everything else, the WA Post article doesn't describe anything that makes it worth buying the Amazon product over a bazillion other products that cost just a bit more (or even the same or less, I don't follow the market that much).

I think it's a reasonable criticism that the band doesn't do much. However, health privacy is one of the most overrated issues of our day relative to functional health tech.

We are 100% capable of having machine based, superior to doctor diagnosis tools with no marginal costs. It's insane that humans still diagnose things. The only major blocker is these overindexed privacy concerns.

Fitbit too, they claim to have the most advanced tracker, but to see anything other than the basic data you have to pay for a premium account.

Anyone has the unpaywalled version ?

From Washington post no less, irony at its finest