Last Updated on November 11, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
The MRIS owns two Newgen medicals treadmills:
which we bought used on Ricardo Switzerland. This treadmill is light weight, does not need a lot of space, an runs quietly. The speed can be ajusted in a range which is sufficient for walking meditation. But the board computer stops after 30 min. and we have to restart the treadmill again. But we can live with that. But since we are researchers we want some data from our activities. The easiest was for us personally is to use a foot pod as a first step. This works with standard foot pods down to about 4 km/h. This is a bit fast for walking meditation, but we can live with that as well.
We also have about 4 Stryd foot pods, all of them bought on Ricardo Switzerland. But all of them have batteries which are nearly dead and the next step will be to replace these batteries. The Stryd can also monitor speeds slower than 4 km/h, but we do not trust these values until this is confirmed scientifically.
Then we informed us about treadmill calibration from DC Rainmaker and Fellnr:
https://petergamma.org/category/treadmill-calibration/
Treadmill calibration is a lot of work if we want to do it as accurately as possible. Then we found that the Xiaomi walking Pad A1 can be monitored and controlled from Home Assistant:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/xiaomi-treadmill-walkingpad-integration/204713
Currently there are three used Xiaomi walking Pad A1:
https://www.galaxus.ch/de/s3/product/kingsmith-walkingpad-a1-laufband-13320225
available on Ricardo Switzerland in greater Zurich area. Should we buy one of those and replace our Newgen medicals treadmills to do calibration with the Xiaomi walking pads?
We decided against that since we found only little information about treadmill accuracy. And treadmill calibration is a lot of work. And who wants to calibrate a treadmill to find out that it strongly fluctuates in speed? We can find hardly any information about this topic if we google for it.
We where twice in a sports stade to calibrate our foot pods but they are still inaccurate. It takes a lot of time to get this to work properly. A smartphone with a training tracker can also be used as a treadmill board computer for walking meditation together with foot pods. The a training tracker display can be configured, a training tracker counts steps and it can be calibrated.
We will stay with our Newgen medicals treadmills, foot pods and a training tracker for the time being and will do further experiments. We did not find any good data yet in scientific journals about treadmill calibration. And if we cannot find data from DC Rainmaker and Rob ter Horst about treadmill accuracy, does this mean that it is a taboo topic, since most of the treatmills cannot be used for scientific studies, since they are not built for this purpose and have issues no one wants to mention? And also hobby scientists will not be happy with data from these devices?