A healthy heart is essential to an active lifestyle.
A healthy heart is essential to an active lifestyle. Although there are a variety of medical tests that can assess the overall health of your heart, a simple diagnostic that you can do at home is to record your heart beat and blood pressure. In this assignment, you will quantitatively describe your heart rate and blood pressure before and after exercise.
Instructions
Your task is to measure the heart rate and blood pressure of at least THREE people before and after exercise. Your selected test subjects need to be healthy individuals who are capable of sustaining at least two challenges of strenuous aerobic exercise, continuously for five minutes.
Once you have finished this activity, you will communicate your results in the form of a report.
NOTE
In order to measure blood pressure, you will need access to a sphygmomanometer. If you do not have access to one, you can still complete the assignment by including qualitative observations of blood pressure.
- For each test subject, measure the heart rate and blood pressure while they are at rest. To be “at rest”, the subject should have been sitting comfortably for at least five minutes, having not performed strenuous exercise for at least twenty minutes.
- Next, have each test subject conduct some sort of strenuous, aerobic exercise (e.g., five minute fun, five minute sprint on an exercise bike, or a run up five flights of stairs). Ensure that all subjects perform the same exercise for the the same length of time.
- Measure the heart rate and blood pressure immediately after the test subject completes the strenuous exercise.
- Wait a minute, then measure the heart rate and blood pressure again.
- Continue to measure the heart rate and blood pressure, at intervals of one minute, until the subject returns to their resting rate.
- Once the subject has returned to resting, repeat the aerobic challenge, measuring the heart rate and blood pressure exactly as you did with the first challenge (complete measurements as outlined in steps three through five).
- Communicate your results in the form of a report.
Techniques
The following information is a review of how to measure your heart rate and blood pressure.
MEASURING HEART RATE
You can find your pulse on a few places on your body where an artery runs close to the surface, without a lot of muscle or other tissue between it and your skin. For your purposes, the carotid pulse is likely to be the easiest to find and to monitor—that is the one at the side of your neck. Some folks are extremely uncomfortable having hands on their necks, so an alternative is to feel for the radial pulse, which is found by pressing with your index or middle finger (more sensitive than the thumb) on the inner wrist below the thumb.
Count the number of heartbeats in twelve seconds. Multiply this number by five. That is your heart rate in beats per minute (bpm), which is not exactly metric, but it is the standard way that physiologists measure heart rate.
MEASURING BLOOD PRESSURE
Different blood pressure measuring devices (sphygmomanometers) work in different ways. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions, or the instructions of someone who knows what they are doing. You might find, for example, the manager of a pharmacy with a free sphygmomanometer to be very helpful upon finding out that you wish to use the machine in the name of honest scientific investigation.
The standard units for measuring blood pressure are millimeters of mercury (mmHg). Normal blood pressure for a healthy adult human is “120 over 80”, which means.
120 mmHg systolic—the maximum pressure as your heart contracts and pumps the blood.
80 mmHg diastolic—the minimum pressure as your heart recovers and the blood slows.
In the event that you have no access to a sphygmomanometer, you’ll need to improvise. You will not have quantitative data, but you will still have data. Once you have felt the carotid pulse at rest, you will be able to indicate whether it is stronger, much stronger, getting stronger, getting weaker, etc. as the experiment progresses. You may also find that the radial pulse is not noticeable until the blood pressure is fairly high. These are obviously not idea solutions, but some data is always better than no data; and it would obviously be unethical to penalize a student for not having a fairly obscure piece of medical equipment. But if you can get a sphygmomanometer, do so.
The Report
The following information will help guide you through the process of putting together your report.
Objective:
Start your report by stating the objective or reason for completing the test. The reader of your report should understand exactly why you completed these tests and what you hoped to learn from them.
Materials :
Provide a descriptive list of all the equipment you required to complete the tests. If you do not use any specialized equipment or materials, then you may omit this section from your report.
Procedure :
Write out each step you took in the test. Anyone who takes your procedure should be able to replicate your tests, exactly as you performed them so be clear, concise, and descriptive.
Your procedure should be written in the past tense and avoid the use pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘we’, or ‘they’.
Write:
- The subject ran up 5 flights of stairs. Once completed, the heart rate and blood pressure were measured and recorded.
Do not write:
- The subject will run up 5 flights of stairs, then I will measure the heart rate and blood pressure. I will record the data in my notes.
Observations :
In science, you should record all relevant observations. Often, your observations will be qualitative and might help to explain your results.
In this activity, note some qualitative observations about your subjects as they complete the tests. For example, you may note that one of your tests subjects was unable to complete the strenuous activity, and starting walking when they should have been running. This observation might help you explain why their readings are different from subjects that complete the activity as intended.
For this activity, include a minimum of THREE qualitative observations.
Results :
Record the experimental data you collected in a table and graph.
Your results section should only report your findings. Do not analyse or try to interpret your data in the results section. Leave this type of analysis for your discussion.
Discussion :
In this section, analysis and discuss your results. It is important to set-up any of your analysis with a bit of background material.
A discussion can take on many different formats, but should include the following:
- A minimum of one paragraph on the background science involved in your tests.
- A minimum of one paragraph that reports your analysis of the data, including any relevant trends.
- A minimum of one paragraph that discusses any errors in your methods or observations that help explain deviations in your data. Do not discuss human error.
Note: In this experiment, you may want to consider discussing the amount of variation between test subjects and what factors might account for that variability.
IMPORTANT
This descriptive study requires you to collect data about a biological process. You are not required to provide a hypothesis as you are not testing the effect of a change in an independent variable on a dependent variable.
Assessment Details
Your submission should include the following:
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