Amazon Halo, the tech giant's app and wearable, is adding a new feature designed to help users understand their functional fitness, dubbed Movement Health. The company is pitching this tool as a way to give users insights about their posture, and help them to solve issues with personalized video suggestions.

Users start by taking a function assessment where they are instructed to complete a series of movements, such as leg balancing and squats. Meanwhile, the app is able to capture these movements through a smartphone camera.

According to the company, the feature combines artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning to analyze the user's posture. Based on a user's stability, mobility and posture, they get a score out of 100. The results also pinpoint different pain areas on the person's body.

The Halo app will then offer users a personalized plan to help them improve their posture, comprised of a set of videos.

WHY IT MATTERS

Physical inactivity is a major issue in the US. According to the CDC, 31 million adults over the age of 50 are inactive. Children are not immune to this issue. The agency predicts that only one in five high school students meet the recommended physical activity guidelines.

"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,” Kelly Starrett, who developed the feature, said in a statement. “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."

THE LARGER TREND

Amazon was a fairly late entry into the wearable space. Last August, the retail giant released the Amazon Halo, a wrist-worn health tracker with an accompanying app. The tool comes with a compact sensor to track activity, temperature and heart rate. It also gave users their body fat percentage and insights into sleep.

But Amazon is hardly the only company in the wearable space. Veterans in the space include the Apple Watch, Samsung, Withings, Garmin and  Fitbit.

There are also a number of companies in the MSK space, looking to give users insights into their functional fitness. For example, Omada rolled out a tool in April that uses computer vision technology to help physical therapists virtually measure a patient's movement and range of motion.

Other names in the space include Hinge Health, Sword Health, Sparta Science, Risalot Health and SpineZone.