Why I’m obsessed with health wearables (and you should be too) | Michael Snyder | Your Body on Tech
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
Genome researcher Michael Snyder believes health wearables, such as smart watches and glucose monitors, can transform medicine, shifting from reactive to predictive. (In fact, he's such a big fan of these devices that he wears eight of them every single day.) From spotting an illness days before symptoms appear to helping prevent the onset of diabetes, learn why the future of health care may be on your wrist. And stick around after his talk for a deep dive conversation with our guest host for the week, author and podcaster Manoush Zomorodi, into the ideas he shared on stage and beyond.
This is episode four of a seven-part series airing this week on TED Talks Daily, where Manoush — and the seven speakers she curated for TED2026 — explore how you can live a healthier life in our high-tech era.
To hear more from Manoush, listen to TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts. Check out her new book, Body Electric, to learn more about the hidden health costs of the digital age.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Anush Zamoroti. I am sitting in for Elise Hugh. I host the TED Radio Hour podcast, usually over on NPR. |
| 0:18.0 | I'm also an author, a two-time TED speaker, and this week I'm here with a special |
| 0:23.0 | series of episodes all about how you can live a healthier life in our high-tech era. So why am I |
| 0:30.6 | here? Okay, so I had the honor of guest curating a session at the recent TED-2020s conference |
| 0:36.7 | all about my obsession. |
| 0:39.7 | Tech, the human body, and what is keeping us human in this digital age? |
| 0:44.7 | Every day this week, we are bringing you one of these talks from my session, |
| 0:48.8 | followed by a conversation with that speaker to go deeper. |
| 0:53.6 | These are people who are at the top of their field. |
| 0:56.3 | And today we are talking about wearables. |
| 0:59.8 | All those smart watches and smart rings and glucose monitors that more and more of us are |
| 1:05.1 | putting on our bodies to monitor our health. |
| 1:08.6 | But what can we actually do with all that information that we're |
| 1:12.1 | collecting? Well, today's speaker has some answers. Michael Snyder is a professor of genetics |
| 1:17.9 | at Stanford University and director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. |
| 1:24.0 | Over the last 20 years, he says he's collected more personal health data than almost any other known human. |
| 1:30.9 | It's all part of his pursuit to show how we can treat each body as an individual, not as a population average. |
| 1:39.4 | And even when we practice healthcare, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. |
| 1:44.0 | You'll travel to a |
| 1:45.0 | physician's office. When you're there, they'll take lots of blood, and from all that blood |
| 1:48.7 | and the time you're there, they actually don't make very many measurements. And from those measurements, |
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