Pulse rate and pulmonary ventilation as predictors of human energy cost.

This study compared the usefulness of the pulse rate and ventilation rate in the prediction of energy cost. Four young men were exercised at six grades on the motor-driven treadmill in order to derive data for regression equations, one to predict oxygen consumption from pulse rate data and the other using the ventilation rate. Separate equations were derived for each subject. The precision of prediction was then tested in three work tasks including treadmill walking while holding a weight in a static contraction, cycling the bicycle ergometer and hand-cranking the ergometer. Although large mean differences in percentage error were recorded in the pulse rate prediction, they were not statistically significant, probably due to large individual variations. The differences in ventilation rate prediction were significant and indicated the need for using closely related activities when deriving the predictive equations. Prediction accomplished with the ventilatory data resulted in smaller errors than did the pu...