Amazon Halo health wearable lifeless in newest cost-cutting transfer

Amazon will now not promote its Halo well being and health tracker, the corporate announced Wednesday.

Amazon unveiled the health-tracking bracelet in 2020, marking its first foray into wearable units and a deeper transfer into the well being care area. Halo, together with an app, can monitor customers’ exercise, physique fats and emotional state, and it is built-in with Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant. Final yr, Amazon expanded the Halo lineup with a bedside sleep tracker referred to as the Halo Rise.

Amazon will cease supporting Halo units and the Halo app on July 31. Customers can delete their Halo well being knowledge from the app, and any remaining knowledge will likely be deleted after Aug. 1, the corporate stated.

“At Amazon, we expect massive, experiment, and put money into new concepts like Amazon Halo in our efforts to please prospects,” the corporate stated. “Whereas we’re pleased with what we constructed, we just lately made the tough resolution to cease supporting Amazon Halo efficient July 31, 2023.”

The corporate stated it is going to refund any purchases made within the final yr of Halo View, Halo Band, Halo Rise and Halo accent bands. It would additionally refund any unused Halo subscription charges.

Halo is the newest Amazon product to get axed as CEO Andy Jassy aggressively cuts bills throughout the corporate amid an financial downturn and slowing retail gross sales. Many unproven bets just like the Glow video-calling device and Scout supply robotic had been sundown in current months. The corporate additionally shuttered its nascent telehealth program, Amazon Care.

Amazon is in the course of the biggest layoffs in its 29-year historical past. The corporate just lately wrapped up a spherical of layoffs impacting 18,000 folks, a few of which had been in its units and companies unit. Final month, Jassy introduced the corporate would lay off a further 9,000 folks, with a lot of the cuts touchdown in its cloud computing, promoting, human assets and Twitch livestreaming items.

Amazon is shedding some staff because of the choice to shutter the Halo line, Dave Limp, Amazon’s {hardware} chief, wrote in a memo to staff shared by an Amazon spokesperson.

“I’m so pleased with the invention and laborious work that went into constructing Halo, however after evaluating our present investments, our long-term targets, and in gentle of the present macroeconomic local weather, we needed to make a tough resolution,” Limp wrote. “It was not taken frivolously, imagine me — and we acknowledge we’re dropping valued staff members in consequence.”

Melissa Cha, Amazon’s vice chairman of sensible house and well being, instructed staffers in a separate memo that the corporate opted to sundown the Halo line on account of vital headwinds, together with an more and more crowded phase and unsure financial situations, The Verge reported.

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