Engineering Wellness

This 3-week course will help students understand how lifestyle and wellness choices impact their physiology using a data-driven approach powered by wearable technology (e.g. Fitbit, Apple Watch, Oura ring). Students will be exposed to leading wellness practices and assess their own smartwatch data to look at real-time physiological responses to wellness interventions such as diet, exercise, awareness meditation, laughter yoga, inquiry-based stress reduction, priming, gratitude and relationship building practices. This course will bring in academic experts and popular wellness leaders including the founder of Laughter Yoga, Dr. Madan Kataria, to learn about cutting edge research and innovation in mental health, and to experience these practices first hand through immersive workshops. The capstone project of the course will involve analyzing personal and class-level anonymized wearable device data to quantify the physiological impacts.