Heart Rate Control During Treadmill Exercise

A computer-controlled treadmill and related data collection and processing systems have been developed for the control of heart rate during treadmill exercise. Minimizing deviations of heart rate from a preset profile is achieved by controlling the speed and/or the gradient of the treadmill. A simple and practical heart rate measurement algorithm has been developed to robustly measure the variations of heart rate. Both conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control and fuzzy proportional-integral (PI) control approaches have been employed for the controller design. The fuzzy proportional-integral algorithm achieved better heart rate tracking performance. Finally, a heart rate based exercising protocol was successfully implemented on the newly designed exercise system