NCT07342673

Vital Coach: A Study of Resiliency in Medical Students

Vital Coach: A Study of Resiliency in Medical Students Using Wearable Technology and Personalized Wellness Coaching

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 49 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Wake Forest University Health Sciences · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 60 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Medical students often begin training with psychological and physiological health metrics superior to their age-matched peers. By graduation, however, rates of depression, anxiety, and physiologic dysregulation are markedly higher, reflecting the cumulative strain of long study hours, high-stakes examinations, and the emotional burden of early patient care. Despite this, few medical schools provide structured, evidence-based tools for students to develop resiliency and recovery skills before clinical rotations begin.

Detailed description

This gap represents both a health crisis and an educational opportunity. Burnout originating in medical school often persists into residency and practice, diminishing empathy and professionalism, and contributing to long-term attrition. Existing wellness offerings are largely reactive, relying on voluntary counseling or broad wellness sessions that fail to provide individualized insight into students' physiological readiness or stress recovery capacity. Moreover, schools lack objective, continuous data to pinpoint when students are physiologically stressed to tailor timely support. Against this backdrop, this study proposes evaluating a structured performance coaching and biometric feedback approach in the context of scheduled academic stressors. Arena Strive is a digital coaching platform that integrates a virtual human performance coach, wearable-derived biometric data, and a focused skills curriculum adapted from other high-stress domains and tailored to frontline healthcare workers. This novel intervention has proven effective in significantly reducing burnout and enhancing professional fulfillment and self-valuation in a large health-system through an 8-week intervention.

Conditions

• Burnout

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Arena Strive	integrates asynchronous coaching, two virtual coaching sessions with a high-performance medicine coach, physiological data from wearable sensors, and a focused curriculum of performance tools tailored to frontline healthcare workers.

Timeline

• Start date: 2026-01-16
• Primary completion: 2026-06-01
• Completion: 2026-06-01
• First posted: 2026-01-15
• Last updated: 2026-03-02

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States