Training the next generation of ‘quantified nurses’

Description

At a bustling university town in the Netherlands, dozens of future nurses obsessively track their sleep, nutrition and exercise using the latest wearable health trackers.

These students are enrolled at Hanze University of Applied Sciences, which is based in Groningen, a city in the north of Netherlands. They are some of the first nurses in the world to receive a comprehensive education in the “Quantified Self” movement.
During the course of the program, the students perform a self-experiment, such as tracking how a physical activity affects stress levels. They can choose from dozens of tracking devices from a drawer stuffed full of options. The students will then learn how to analyze the data they collect and present their research to the group.
The program is taught by Martijn de Groot, a research director at the Groningen-based Quantified Self Institute. Yesterday, at the Quantified Self Conference in San Francisco, de Groot urged other medical educators to follow suit.