Vital Coach: A Study of Resiliency in Medical Students

Wake Forest University (WFU)

Status: Not yet enrolling

Conditions: Burnout

Treatments: Behavioral: Arena Strive

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT07342673

IRB00140462

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Full 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.

Enrollment: 49 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 60 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• active first year Wake Forest School of Medicine medical students
• have an Android or iOS smart phone
• are willing to download the Arena Strive application

Exclusion criteria

• under the age of 18; or over the age of 60
• pregnant at enrollment or during course of study
• any self-reported cardiac conditions that may impact heart rate and heart rate variability

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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49 participants in 1 patient group

Arena Strive

Experimental group

Description:

digital coaching platform, which 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.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Arena Strive