HEART RATE MONITORING SYSTEMS IN GROUPS FOR RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY ASSESSMENT OF CARDIORESPIRATORY FITNESS ANALYSIS

Abstract

According to statistics in Taiwan, the proportion of students engaged in regular exercise has declined drastically with the increase in education level. This study thus aims to provide a platform for monitoring of group cardiorespiratory fitness to allow users such as teachers or coaches to easily monitor a group’s exercise condition, intensity and duration to increase exercise efficiency, promote exercise motivation and reduce exercise risk. Based on group measurement concept and wearable chest strap textiles integrated with heart rate monitoring devices, teachers or coaches can immediately acquire and display all heart rate information on a notebook computer together with synchronous field projection display. The acquired heart rate data can also be automatically recorded and analyzed to assist in assessing the physical fitness. Our proposed platform aims to monitor the cardiorespiratory fitness in group mainly for college students and young office worker. To validate the stability of our platform in the long term, we recruited the college students in a physical fitness class, 35 in total, as the subjects for long term observation. In the experiments the subjects are divided into “varsity group” and “sedentary group” according to whether they are with or without regular exercise habits. Subjects wearing chest straps were instructed to take the 3-minute Step Test and the 5-minute constant intensity exercise test. The results show that the “varsity group” has a lower resting heart rate ([Formula: see text][Formula: see text]bpm vs. [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]bpm), a lower exercise heart rate ([Formula: see text][Formula: see text]bpm vs. [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]bpm) and a lower mean heart rate ([Formula: see text][Formula: see text]bpm vs. [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]bpm). The “Varsity group” also has a higher heart rate recovery percentage at the first minute ([Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text]) and the second minute ([Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text]). Moreover, all these indexes have a high correlation with the fitness index in the 3-minute Step Test, among which the percentage of heart rate recovery in the first minute shows the highest positive correlation ([Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]). Our wearable heart rate monitoring system can thus be deemed as effective to provide a platform for measurement of group heart rates and for assessment of cardiorespiratory fitness.