Good Life Project

How Wearable Tech Could Save Your Life: Future of Medicine [Ep. 5]

December 1, 2025

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  • The concept of "omics" involves measuring vast collections of molecules (like the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome) to gain a far more comprehensive picture of an individual's health than traditional diagnostics allow. 
  • Wearable technology, such as smartwatches, provides continuous, real-time health monitoring that can detect illness pre-symptomatically and offers more accurate physiological baselines than measurements taken in a clinical setting. 
  • The current healthcare system is incentivized for "sick care" (treating illness) rather than true healthcare (prevention), which hinders the widespread adoption of powerful preventative tools like deep molecular profiling and continuous tracking. 
  • A proposed microneedle array tattoo technology, utilizing color changes to determine biomarker concentrations, is envisioned to be available for public use within five to ten years following extensive clinical trials. 
  • Future diagnostic tattoos could monitor multiple key biomarkers beyond glucose, such as serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, or cortisol, enabling informed preventative healthcare decisions. 
  • To address privacy concerns regarding visible diagnostic data, these tattoo platforms can be designed to operate using near-infrared inks, making them invisible to the naked eye but readable by a smartphone or smartwatch. 

Segments

Future of Medicine Series Launch
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: The Good Life Project is launching a two-month ‘Future of Medicine’ series focusing on diagnostics and regenerative medicine.
  • Summary: The podcast is featuring a ‘Future of Medicine’ series every Monday through November and December. This series spotlights groundbreaking researchers and innovations in areas like cancer, heart disease, and medical technology. The goal is to explore discoveries shifting medicine from treatment to prevention.
Introducing Guests and Innovations
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(00:00:48)
  • Key Takeaway: The episode features Michael Snyder, a precision medicine pioneer, and Ali Yedison from Imperial College London, who is developing biosensing tattoo technology.
  • Summary: The episode explores innovations allowing the body to signal sickness before symptoms appear, potentially through color-changing health monitoring tattoos. Michael Snyder is noted for founding 17 companies and publishing over 900 papers. Ali Yedison’s work focuses on biosensing tattoos for monitoring conditions like diabetes and mental health.
Sponsor Break: Capital One Venture X
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(00:02:24)
  • Key Takeaway: The Capital One Venture X card offers unlimited double miles on all purchases and access to over 1,000 airport lounges.
  • Summary: The Capital One Venture X card provides unlimited double miles on everything purchased. Cardholders receive premium benefits when booking through Capital One travel. Access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide is also included with the card.
Sponsor Break: Shark Beauty Cryo Glow
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(00:02:53)
  • Key Takeaway: The Shark Beauty Cryo Glow mask combines high-energy LEDs, infrared, and under-eye cooling for multiple skincare treatments.
  • Summary: The Cryo Glow is the number one skincare facial device in the U.S., offering four treatments: better aging, skin clearing, skin sustain, and under-eye revive. Its ‘insta-chill cold tech’ provides immediate cooling relief under the eyes. Listeners can use promo code GigglySquad for a discount.
Sponsor Break: Gab for Kids’ Tech
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(00:03:54)
  • Key Takeaway: Gab offers ‘slow technology’ solutions like GPS watches and phones without internet/social media for phased independence.
  • Summary: Gab provides safe connection for families through devices like the Gab Watch 3E, which includes GPS tracking. Parents can manage connection via the MyGab app, setting focus modes and safe zones. Their progression moves from watches to first phones without internet, growing with the child.
Defining and Applying ‘Omics’
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(00:05:03)
  • Key Takeaway: Omics refers to the comprehensive measurement of molecular collections in the body, such as the genome or proteome, to create deep health profiles.
  • Summary: Omics is a collection of measurements across different molecular systems (e.g., genome, transcriptome, proteome). Dr. Snyder’s team measures tens of thousands of molecules in blood and urine to get a much better health picture than the 15 things typically measured by physicians. Deep profiling identified pre-symptomatic issues like early cancer and serious heart issues in 49 out of 109 followed individuals.
Incentives and Wearable Health Tracking
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(00:09:21)
  • Key Takeaway: The US healthcare system’s financial incentives favor treating illness over paying for preventative health monitoring, necessitating a change in alignment.
  • Summary: The current system pays doctors when people are ill (‘sick care’), not when they are healthy, creating misaligned incentives for preventative testing like genome sequencing. Smartwatches are powerful health trackers that can detect illness early, such as elevated heart rate preceding COVID-19 infection. Heart rate and heart rate variability from smartwatches should be incorporated into health monitoring due to their accuracy outside the doctor’s office (‘white coat syndrome’).
Car Dashboard Analogy for Health
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(00:12:43)
  • Key Takeaway: Humans lack a health dashboard comparable to a car’s, which constantly relays vital operational data, leading to reactive rather than proactive health management.
  • Summary: Race cars use over 400 sensors to relay health information to the dashboard, yet people operate without continuous health indicators. Wearables provide this continuous tracking, allowing conditions to be caught early before they become catastrophic, contrasting with the current practice of waiting for symptoms.
Continuous Glucose Monitoring Insights
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(00:14:14)
  • Key Takeaway: Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) reveal highly personalized food responses, showing that even theoretically healthy foods can cause significant glucose spikes.
  • Summary: CGMs measure glucose every five minutes, revealing that individual responses to foods like potatoes or white bread are highly personal, often due to factors like the microbiome. Avoiding foods that cause high spikes improves ’time in range’ and is correlated with better cardiovascular health outcomes. Real-time feedback from CGMs is highly behavioral modifying, leading users to naturally adjust their diets.
Sponsor Break: Airbnb for Hosting
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(00:02:51)
  • Key Takeaway: Hosting an extra space on Airbnb is presented as a practical way to earn extra income toward future adventures.
  • Summary: The host used Airbnb to find a stunning home for a retreat, emphasizing how the space facilitated reflection and connection. Hosting your home or extra space while away is an easy way to earn money. Hosts can find out their potential earnings at airbnb.com/host.
Sponsor Break: BetterHelp for Therapy
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(00:23:54)
  • Key Takeaway: Therapy is framed as a valuable new tradition for gaining clarity and grounding, especially during the potentially chaotic holiday season.
  • Summary: The holidays often bring underlying emotions to the surface, making it a good time to establish new traditions like therapy. Talking with a professional helps create space for self-care and finding clarity amid seasonal swirl. Listeners receive 10% off at betterhelp.com/goodlifeproject.
Sponsor Break: Capital One Quicksilver Card
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(00:24:57)
  • Key Takeaway: The Capital One Quicksilver card offers 1.5% cash back on all holiday purchases.
  • Summary: The Quicksilver card allows users to earn unlimited 1.5% cash back on all spending. This applies even to unusual holiday purchases like ‘Turtle Doves.’ Terms apply, and details are available at CapitalOne.com.
Smartwatch Metrics and Baselines
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(00:25:31)
  • Key Takeaway: The value of smartwatch data lies not just in absolute accuracy, but in tracking shifts away from an individual’s established healthy baseline.
  • Summary: Smartwatches accurately measure resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), where high variability is healthy and low variability signals disease. They also measure blood oxygen, skin temperature, and galvanic stress response (skin conductance). Even if a measurement like skin temperature isn’t perfectly accurate, tracking the change from one’s personal baseline is crucial for health monitoring.
Detecting Illness with Wearables
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(00:27:35)
  • Key Takeaway: Resting heart rate and HRV changes detected by wearables provided early, pre-symptomatic alerts for conditions like Lyme disease and respiratory viral infections.
  • Summary: The speaker first detected Lyme disease when resting heart rate increased and blood oxygen dropped, all before symptoms appeared. Respiratory viral infections, including asymptomatic ones, can be detected by tracking resting heart rate, which can shift by as little as two beats per minute. Low heart rate variability is a marker for disease, including cardiovascular issues and infections, which watches can track.
Future of Wearable Technology
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(00:30:56)
  • Key Takeaway: Future health monitoring will integrate retinal scanning, voice recognition, and advanced remote blood testing to create comprehensive, passive health profiles.
  • Summary: Future technology includes retinal scanning to detect Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease, potentially becoming a routine exam component. Remote monitoring using mail-in blood droplets can now measure 7,000 analytes, informing personalized recommendations via AI. The goal is to close the gap between lifespan and healthspan, ensuring the last decade of life is healthy.
Risk of Over-Tracking and Education
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(00:34:56)
  • Key Takeaway: While there is a risk of inducing anxiety through excessive real-time data, education allows patients to use quantified data positively to manage known risks.
  • Summary: Physicians initially feared genome sequencing would create hypochondriacs, but education enabled patients to use risk information (like BRCA mutations) proactively for screening. Similarly, continuous data requires education for patients and physicians to interpret shifts as actionable alerts rather than causes for panic. Knowing risks dictates how often specific health markers should be measured.
Sponsor Break: NutraFall for Hair Health
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(00:37:23)
  • Key Takeaway: NutraFall is the number one dermatologist-recommended hair growth supplement, effective for various causes of hair thinning, including menopause and postpartum shedding.
  • Summary: The product supports thicker, stronger, faster-growing hair with less shedding, often showing results in three to six months. It is recommended for diverse groups, including those experiencing menopause or postpartum hair loss. Listeners receive $10 off their first subscription month using promo code GoodLife.
Sponsor Break: DripDrop Fast Hydration
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(00:38:41)
  • Key Takeaway: DripDrop delivers proven fast hydration using a precise electrolyte/glucose ratio, offering three times the electrolytes and half the sugar of leading sports drinks.
  • Summary: DripDrop is doctor-developed to rehydrate the body and mind faster and more effectively than water alone. It is trusted by medical professionals and sports teams for rapid absorption, improving energy, focus, and mood. Listeners get 20% off their first order using promo code GoodLife.
Sponsor Break: Capital One Saver Card
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(00:39:53)
  • Key Takeaway: The Capital One Saver card offers unlimited 3% cash back on dining and entertainment purchases.
  • Summary: The Capital One Saver card provides a high cash-back rate on dining and entertainment. This card allows users to earn rewards on everyday spending categories. Terms apply, and details are available at CapitalOne.com.
Sponsor Break: Shark Beauty Cryo Glow (Repeat)
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(00:40:23)
  • Key Takeaway: The Shark Beauty Cryo Glow mask combines high-energy LEDs, infrared, and under-eye cooling for multiple skincare treatments.
  • Summary: The Cryo Glow is the number one skincare facial device in the U.S., offering four treatments: better aging, skin clearing, skin sustain, and under-eye revive. Its ‘insta-chill cold tech’ provides immediate cooling relief under the eyes. Listeners can use promo code GigglySquad for a discount.
Introducing Biosensing Tattoos
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(00:41:24)
  • Key Takeaway: Professor Ali Yedison’s lab develops biosensing technologies, including color-changing tattoos, to monitor biomarkers like glucose and stress in real time.
  • Summary: Biosensors measure biomarker concentrations (like glucose or cortisol) using electronic, optical, or magnetic means, often integrated into medical devices. The tattoo platform uses injectable materials that change color or fluorescence intensity in response to target markers. This allows for continuous, naked-eye monitoring or quantitative analysis via smartphone imaging.
Developing and Validating Smart Inks
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(00:49:01)
  • Key Takeaway: New medical device technologies like smart inks undergo rigorous, multi-stage validation, moving from lab assays to blood samples, animal testing, and multi-centered human clinical trials.
  • Summary: Development starts with lab validation for sensitivity and selectivity before testing on spiked patient blood samples. Regulatory compliance, often requiring animal experiments, precedes small human trials (1 to 10 patients). Final validation involves complex, multi-centered, double-blinded clinical trials benchmarked against current standards like existing electrochemical glucose monitors.
Applications Beyond Glucose Monitoring
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(00:52:50)
  • Key Takeaway: The tattoo technology is being developed to monitor mental health biomarkers like cortisol, and performance metrics like electrolyte levels for athletes.
  • Summary: The technology aims to monitor cortisol, a stress biomarker linked to anxiety and depression, in real time. Other targeted markers include serotonin, adrenaline, and dopamine for mental health applications. Athletes can use the sensors to track electrolytes (sodium, potassium) to determine dehydration status during exercise.
Real-Time Feedback and Regulation
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(00:54:57)
  • Key Takeaway: The color-changing tattoos provide immediate visual feedback, enabling users to self-regulate their physiology, such as lowering cortisol via breathing techniques.
  • Summary: The system moves diagnostics from a single snapshot to continuous monitoring, alerting patients in real time as colors shift (e.g., blue to red for rising cortisol). This visual feedback loop supports the ‘quantified self’ movement, allowing individuals to engage in protective actions like breathing exercises and immediately see the physiological response.
Implementation of Tattoo Technology
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(00:59:06)
  • Key Takeaway: The biosensing tattoos will be applied by healthcare professionals using a painless, single-push applicator device featuring a microneedle array.
  • Summary: Implementation is envisioned through healthcare professionals using a specialized applicator, similar to current CGM insertion. This device uses a microneedle array, much smaller than CGM probes, to inject the tattoo ink instantly. The technology is expected to be available within five to ten years, pending detailed clinical trial completion.
Microneedle Tattoo Mechanism
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(00:59:54)
  • Key Takeaway: The diagnostic tattoo utilizes a painless microneedle array to instantly inject sensing material under the skin for color-change analysis.
  • Summary: The technology involves a microneedle array, much smaller than a standard sensing probe, which is painlessly inserted into the skin. This array determines biomarker concentrations through observable color changes. This process is designed to be instantaneous, potentially allowing a patient to receive the tattoo during a doctor’s visit.
Availability Timeline and Trials
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(01:00:48)
  • Key Takeaway: Availability for the microneedle diagnostic tattoo is projected within five to ten years due to the necessity of multi-centered clinical trials.
  • Summary: The research phase necessitates detailed, multi-centered clinical trials to prove the technology’s efficacy against existing methods, such as electrochemical glucose monitoring. This rigorous validation process dictates the five-to-ten-year timeline for public availability. Continuous data collection for currently burdensome markers is expected to be game-changing.
Future Diagnostics and Biomarkers
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(01:02:00)
  • Key Takeaway: The future of medical diagnostics involves monitoring numerous biomarkers like neurotransmitters and hormones for preventative health insights.
  • Summary: Currently, only glucose monitoring is easily accessible via such technology, but the future promises monitoring for many other biomarkers related to health conditions. This includes tracking concentrations of serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, or cortisol. Such monitoring allows individuals to make informed decisions before conditions become critical.
Privacy and Medication Tracking
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(01:02:40)
  • Key Takeaway: Invisible tattoo inks readable only by a smartphone can mitigate stigma, and the platform can also track medication effectiveness in real-time.
  • Summary: To combat the stigma of visible medical data, the devices can be designed to operate in near-infrared, creating invisible tattoo inks readable only by a paired smartphone or smartwatch, ensuring full privacy. Furthermore, this wearable platform can track the concentration of prescribed medications to verify their real-time effectiveness for conditions like heart or mental health issues.
Future Series Preview
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(01:04:20)
  • Key Takeaway: The next episode in the Future of Medicine series will feature Dr. Ross Levine discussing revolutionary advances in cancer research and treatment.
  • Summary: The Good Life Project is airing the Future of Medicine series every Monday through December, covering breakthroughs in diagnostics and treatments. The upcoming conversation focuses on cancer research, including AI-powered diagnostics and breakthrough immunotherapies. Dr. Levine will offer insights into detecting and preventing cancer before it starts.
Sponsor Message: Capital One
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(01:06:14)
  • Key Takeaway: The Capital One Savor Card offers unlimited 3% cash back on dining and entertainment purchases.
  • Summary: The Capital One Savor Card provides unlimited 3% cash back specifically on dining and entertainment spending. This benefit is highlighted as a way to maximize rewards on everyday activities. Terms and conditions apply, and users should check Capital One’s website for full details.
Sponsor Message: Shark Beauty Cryo Glow
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(01:06:43)
  • Key Takeaway: The Shark Beauty Cryo Glow is the number one skincare facial device combining high-energy LEDs, infrared, and under-eye cooling for four treatments in one.
  • Summary: The Cryo Glow device offers four treatments: anti-aging, skin clearing, skin sustain, and under-eye revive using insta-chill cold tech. Listeners can receive 10% off their Cryo Glow purchase by using the promo code GigglySquad at sharkninja.com. The device is promoted as a luxury spa moment for self-care.
Sponsor Message: Nordstrom Rack
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(01:07:44)
  • Key Takeaway: Nordstrom Rack is offering Racked Friday deals with an extra 40% off Red Tag Clearance, resulting in total savings up to 75% off.
  • Summary: During this limited-time promotion, shoppers can achieve total savings of up to 75% off by taking an extra 40% off already marked-down clearance items. This sale includes gifts for everyone from brands like Vince, Cole Haan, and Sam Edelman. All sales during this promotion are final, and restrictions apply.
Sponsor Message: Progressive Insurance
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(01:08:12)
  • Key Takeaway: Progressive Insurance simplifies comparing rates and offers potential savings when customers bundle their home and auto policies.
  • Summary: Progressive makes it easy for consumers to check if they can save money on insurance by bundling their home and auto policies together. Potential savings vary by individual circumstances and are not available in all states. Customers are encouraged to try comparing rates at Progressive.com.