Joint Parameter-State Estimation-Based Control of Heart Rate During Treadmill Exercise

The purpose of this work is the design of a control system for the speed of a treadmill with the aim of forcing the heart rate of an individual who runs on it to follow a reference signal set in advance by the medical teams for the coronary recovery of the person. To this end, the original nonlinear continuous-time model describing the heart rate response to exercise is discretized to obtain a nonlinear discrete-time system. Then, a feedback linearization-based control law is designed to achieve the control objective. The control command requires the values of the parameters of the model along with the states. Since both of them are unknown/unmeasureable, a joint parameter-state estimation algorithm is deployed to obtain an estimation of their values, which are then used in the control law calculation.