Last Updated on November 26, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
We think that treadmills for exercise stress tests could be a great tool to study the long-term effect of practicing meditation on stress. These devices are used by medical doctors and deliver helpful information about our heart. And we think it is highly desirable for mediators to have such a device at home. First for practicing and analyzing walking meditation, but also to study our stress level.
When we began to study these devices it was similar to Adinstruments channel recorders to measure ECG and breath rate with a respiration rate transducer. Such devices are newly available for around 20 000 USD. which is too much for us personally to be used as a scientific home trainer.
The situation for exercise stress treadmills is not much different. New devices cost around 14 000 USD. They are not optimized for low-cost high-quality, but the MRIS is. What makes these devices so expensive? What stoke us is that these stress treadmills are usually very heavy, around 200 kg. And what makes them heavy is not the motor it is the case.
One option to solve this problem is to buy used devices. But even used these devices are difficult to find. On the other hand we can find a lot of used treadmills for sporting activities in the range from 150 USD to 8 000 USD. We suppose that we will find one among those which fits our needs.
There are also new and very robust treadmills available on Aliexpress, but we suppose that shipping costs for those are very high and it is not worth it to import those.
We found Precor treadmills on eBay used up to 4 000 USD. Do they not also work for scientists which do not have a grant for research? Such devices are also available used in greater Zurich area which are pulled from Fitness centers.
We suppose that critical about these devices how accurately they run to get highly accurate speed and distance data. But should a used sports treadmill which costs that much not also fit these criteria?
We have to find this out by ourselves. There is a great Rasperrry Pi treadmill speed sensor available with ANT+ and Zwift support which we have to re code to our application. But then we suppose it is a very accurate device which can be used for research purposes.
Treadmill motors can be replaced and can be found cheap on Aliexpress at a high quality. We can also replace the treadmill running belt, we have an instruction for a treadmill control circuit based on Arduino (link in our journal). And we think it is not so difficult to build a mechanism to uplift the treadmill which is required for the Bruce protocol by ourselves.
Also other mechanical parts or treadmills can eventually replaced by 3.th party components. The last question which is open is how much quality is required for a research grade stress treadmill? We do not know this answer. We suppose it is the best solution to start doing some experiments with a simple treadmill and do some data analysis and compare these data to data from professional devices. And we think sooner or later we have a device which fits our needs and has a quality which can be validated for scientific purposes.