LAUSR

Japanese medical students spend their school days under a dense curriculum. It is often difficult to maintain their healthy lifestyle. After graduation, most of them participate in clinical training programs as residents. It is also difficult to maintain a normal life because they are engaged in different specialized departments every few months. Such an environment is considered prone to mental health problems. In fact, one in four residents are reported to be newly depressed two months after the start of clinical training (Maeno T, et al. 2008). These mental health issues are thought to be affected by changes in daily life, but it is difficult to know such changes. In order to investigate changes in their daily lives, we developed a data collection system related to mental health via the Internet. The subjects were 22 medical students who graduated from our university in March 2017. They were asked to wear activity tracker wrist bands from December 2016. They were also asked to answer the questionnaire on a web site every week as much as possible, and the responses were collected via the Internet together with the activity data. The first eight months of the observation period, including four months before the start of clinical training and four month after the start of clinical training, are divided into four quarters every two months, and the averaged sleep time and responses to the questionnaire in each period were investigated. The average number of days that the sleep was effectively recorded during each two months was 28–48. The average number of responses to the questionnaire during each two months was 6.0–7.2. Residents in the initial clinical training period should be very busy, but the system we have developed seems to have worked well with them for the first four months after the start of clinical training. Whether this system would work as well a longer period is a further problem. This study is supported by KAKENHI 16K01753.