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.

 
 
 

Average Steps Per Day by Medical School Rotation

 
 
 

Average Miles Per Day by Medical School Rotation

 
 
 

Average Floors Per Day by Medical School Rotation

 
 
 

Average Minutes of Activity Per Day, by Type of Activity, by Medical School Rotation

 
 
 

Average Hours of Sleep Per Day by Medical School Rotation