The Energy Topography of the Third Year of Medical School

The third year of medical school is, traditionally, comprised of a series of rotations through the core areas of medicine. Students spend several weeks rotating on different care teams in Internal Medicine, Surgery, Neurology, Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Obstetrics & Gynecology. While these are all specialities common to modern medicine, as a whole, medicine is heterogeneous. Not only are the types of patients, diseases, and treatments very different between specialities, but so too are the day-to-day activity levels of physicians who work in these specialities.

I wanted to see if I could quantify and gain a window of insight into how activity levels can be different among medical specialities. To do this, I wore a Fitbit throughout my third-year medical school rotations, allowing me to track, on a daily basis, the number of steps I took (and thereby total distance traveled), the number of floors I climbed, the number of hours I slept, and how active I was each day and for how long. The charts below show average data for each rotation, yielding a descriptive study of the energy topography of the third year of medical school. Data are plotted as mean ± standard deviation.

Of note: Fitbit does not provide a mechanism for users to easily export their data. To free your data and gain access to the raw data in a usable format, it just takes a little bit of javascript, Google Spreadsheets tinkering, and the Fitbit API — as detailed here on the Quantified Self.