Last Updated on November 27, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
On Google Scholar we can find a lot of papers where treadmills are used:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=treadmill&btnG=
But how do the treadmills which are used in papers differ from sports treadmills? Some years ago we became interested in consumer grade heart rate monitors trough DC Rainmaker, Rob ter Horst and others. But after a long evaluation period the most interesting heart rate monitors are for us personally 3 channel ECG devices.These are gold standard for HR measurements up to around 15 km/h on treadmills, optical heart rate monitors are not. And we always miss validation papers for our applications for OHRMs. With ECG devices we do not have to write a new validation paper for every new Apple watch model which comes onto the market.
Now we have a similar problem with treadmills, and we expect a similar result here. What we experienced with commercially available heart rate monitors is that we suppose that they where first tested for research applications and that the manufacturers found out that they are not very suitable for those. Will optical heart rate monitors ever reach the accuracy of ECG devices? We can hardly find any OHRMs from Adinstruments, Biopac and iWorx. And will sports treadmills ever meet the high quality standards of research or medical treadmills?
But still we suppose that we will find stress treadmills which costs less than 14 000 USD for our applications, or we will built them by ourselves, as we have found ECG devices which costs less than the 20 000 USD Adinstruments channel recorders, but can be used instead of those.