Heart Rate Monitoring Systems in Groups for Assessment of Cardiorespiratory Fitness Analysis

With the evolution of technology and growth of economy, people´s living style has gradually changed from Active-lifestyle into Sedentary-lifestyle. According to statistics, the ratio of students engaging in regular exercise has been declined with the increase in education. Under the long-term shortage of exercise, teenagers usually cannot develop regular exercise habits as soon as possible which has indirectly lead to the decrease in age of having chronic cardiovascular diseases. It is thus our research motivation and goal to build a system to allow users such as teachers or coaches to easily monitor a group´s exercise condition, intensity and duration. Also, our system should be able to measure in a convenient way, to allow users to move around freely, to promote exercise efficiency, to improve exercise motivation and to even reduce the risk of exercise. Our research proposes an assisting system for teachers or coaches. Based on group measurement concept, using wearable chest strap textiles integrated with heart rate monitoring device, teachers or coaches can immediately receive and display all heart rate information on a notebook computer together with synchronous field projection. In the experiments the subjects are divided into "the varsity group" with regular exercise and "the sedentary group" without regular exercise habit. Subjects wearing chest strap were instructed to take five-minute constant intensity exercise test. The results show that "the varsity group" has lower resting heart rate, lower exercise heart rate and lower mean heart rate. Therefore, our wearable heart rate monitoring system is indeed effective in measurement of group heart rate and in assessment and comparison of cardiorespiratory fitness.