Rest easy: AI is now in charge of your health

On the show floor at the tech Mecca, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, a flood of health tech products demonstrated how intelligence and biology are being converged to bring about a health revolution.

Going back to the toothbrush, the Y-Brush Halo is an example of how a grooming gadget is pivoting to use AI for personal health and prevention of problems: As you go through your brushing routine (condensed to a few seconds on this gadget) its built-in Smart Breath Analysis uses an integrated gas sensor (called SmartNose) and AI to monitor chemical signals, or biomarkers, in your breath. The mouth is actually an area where health changes often show up early.

The collected data is securely sent (via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) to an accompanying app or platform, where AI compares the detected biomarkers against thousands of instances of patterns associated with various health conditions. The user receives alerts or insights regarding potential early indicators of health issues—300 of them ranging from gum disease to metabolic stress, diabetes, and liver issues. This way, a non-invasive process transforms daily oral hygiene into a passive but powerful health screening tool.

Physical and agentic

The Y-Brush toothbrush is just one of the health tech products unveiled at CES, where, in previous years, we’ve seen all manner of wacky gadgets, providing us with dashboards of raw numbers that we were left to interpret. Today, that era is over. We are seeing what is called the “industrialization of the self", a big shift where human longevity is managed with the same precision once reserved for industrial manufacturing.

The revolution is not in the gadgets or the sensors themselves, but in the AI that now interprets our unique biological data, predicts future health risks, and proactively intervenes. It’s a shift from passive data collection to AI-driven, actionable intelligence.

One thing that makes this possible is the extreme miniaturization of advanced sensors. These allow continuous, unobtrusive data collection. Technologies that once required a hospital room are now integrated into rings, patches, and scales, silently gathering a constant stream of physiological data without disrupting our daily lives.

Keep an eye out for the Samsung AI Health Ring, a small, always-on wearable that quietly tracks your heart rhythm, sleep, temperature, breathing and stress around the clock, building a personalized baseline of your body. Unlike step counters of the past, this ring feeds a continuous stream of biological signals into Samsung’s AI health platform, which looks for subtle deviations that can point to fatigue, illness or longer-term risks—turning a piece of jewellery into a silent early-warning system you never have to think about.

AI as a health OS

What’s emerging now is AI as a health operating system—not a single device, not a single app, but a layer that sits above everything, quietly coordinating your biology. For decades, healthcare involved going to different machines in different places at different times, each providing a tiny, disconnected snapshot. A blood test here, an ECG there, a sleep study in a lab, a glucose check when you remember. AI is becoming the central brain that: collects data from products and stitches it into one continuous biological story and watches for patterns, giving early warnings.

As with all exciting new AI advances, users must be responsible enough to cross-check anything that's important. Google has just had to pull some of its AI Overviews (the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results) in response to a recent investigation by The Guardian, published in early January 2026. The report highlighted that certain health-related queries were producing inaccurate, misleading, or incomplete information that could put users' health at risk.

I myself have my Apple Watch to be thankful for. I had nothing more than a fever from a tooth infection when I found a tight, caged feeling gripping my chest. I waited patiently, but it only became more prominent. Suddenly, my watch buzzed and said my heart rate was really high, and I should go to a hospital. I had collected my medical papers and calmly had a neighbour drive me to the one next door. No one knows quite why this shocking heart symptom happened, but at the hospital, they kept me in for two days, brought everything back to normal and sent me packing back home to rest easy.

The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.