Michael Snyder: Why we need to track health, not disease
Stanford genomics director Michael Snyder says we need to track health continuously—not wait for disease. Wearables, home blood tests, and wellness scores like intrinsic capacity can catch problems early and power AI, but today's sickcare system still pays for diagnoses, not prevention.
Michael Snyder, Director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University, wears four wrist devices and two rings—not for show, but to demonstrate how sensors could shift medicine from reactive sickcare to proactive healthcare. In a Lifespan.io interview published August 28, 2026, he argues that 24/7 tracking builds the longitudinal data personalized medicine and AI models require.
Key Takeaways
- Snyder's lab detected Lyme disease, respiratory viruses, and COVID presymptomatically using wearable baselines.
- US insurers reward disease ICD codes, not wellness metrics—slowing clinic adoption of continuous tracking.
- An ARPA-H project targets an FDA-approved intrinsic capacity score plus a roughly $100 home health test.
- Individual health trajectories matter more than single snapshots against population reference ranges.
- Related exerkines research links short, intense exercise to stronger cardiometabolic protein shifts than moderate workouts.
Why Does Michael Snyder Wear So Many Health Trackers?
Wearables measure around the clock while charged, establishing personal baselines for resting heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, and more. Snyder notes most people will wear one or two devices—not his six or seven—but even a single tracker can flag shifts from normal patterns.
His team put devices on research cohorts and quickly spotted illness signals. Snyder detected his own Lyme disease presymptomatically when blood oxygen dropped. During the 2020 pandemic, a Fitbit partnership showed COVID could be identified before symptoms—especially useful given COVID's long presymptomatic window compared with influenza's 36–48 hours.
Can Wearables Detect Illness Before Symptoms Appear?
Snyder calls early alerting the first clinically actionable demonstration. Family members of transplant patients wear devices; red alerts prompt testing, self-isolation, and targeted treatment such as Paxlovid when used immediately. Workplace stress currently triggers more alerts than infections, but Snyder says combining data types should soon separate mental from physical stress.
Continuous glucose monitors tell a similar story. When his team placed CGMs on people thought metabolically normal, many showed spikes rivaling diabetics—highly personal responses one annual lab draw would miss. For deeper longevity and biohacking approaches, that granularity matters.
What Is Intrinsic Capacity—and Why Does It Matter?
Snyder's ARPA-H PROSPR grant targets intrinsic capacity, a wellness score built on WHO functional domains: cognition, locomotion, psychological well-being, sensory function, and vitality. Unlike ICD disease codes that drive reimbursement, intrinsic capacity would quantify health for drug trials and daily monitoring.
The project aims for FDA approval and a home test combining blood microsampling, wearables, and surveys—costing around $100. Snyder's spinout Iollo mails fingertip blood samples for roughly 650 measurements paired with AI recommendations. He argues resting heart rate from a morning smartwatch beats a white-coat clinic reading distorted by anxiety.
Why Hasn't Healthcare Embraced Continuous Health Tracking?
Wearables are embedded in research but rarely in standard clinics. Snyder blames misaligned US incentives: health plans average 18-month member tenure, so prevention investments benefit competitors. Large trials proving health tracking saves lives—not just catches disease—remain scarce.
He envisions AI agents pulling wearable, biochemical, and imaging data into 24/7 dashboards—like car warning lights. Individual trajectory beats population ranges: a liver enzyme doubling may stay normal yet signal trouble months before routine checkups. Separate Cell Reports Medicine research found sprint-interval exercise shifts more cardiometabolic proteins than moderate sessions—evidence that what you track shapes what you improve.