Content area

Full Text

Chiu-Ping Yeh [1; 2] and Hsien-Cheng Huang [3] and Yaju Chang [4] and Ming-De Chen [5] and Miaoju Hsu [6; 7]

Academic Editor: Leonardo dos Santos

1, Department of Physical Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, ntnu.edu.tw

2, Physical Educational Office, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, kuas.edu.tw

3, Section of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine, Taipei City Hospital, Yangming Branch, Taipei, Taiwan, tch.gov.taipei

4, Department of Physical Therapy and Graduate Institute of Rehabilitation Science, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan, cgu.edu.tw

5, Department of Occupational Therapy, College of Health Science, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, kmu.edu.tw

6, Department of Physical Therapy, College of Health Science, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, kmu.edu.tw

7, Department of Rehabilitation, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, kmuh.org.tw

Received Aug 31, 2017; Accepted Nov 16, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Cardiopulmonary fitness, which is most accurately presented by maximal oxygen uptake (V˙O2max), is related to mortality in older adults. Laboratory maximal exercise tests with a treadmill or an ergometer can precisely evaluate V˙O2max, which is not always accessible due to expensive equipment and trained personnel being required [1, 2]. For practical purposes, field tests are developed and used to measure cardiopulmonary fitness. Based on the characteristics of the older adult, the common test modes of field tests are stepping and walking tests.

A three-minute stepping test is widely used to predict cardiopulmonary fitness in that heart rate (HR) responses immediately or during recovery after the stepping test are recorded and calculated. Different stepping frequency, bench height, test duration, the number of stages, and the scoring method have been developed for particular populations. For example, Petrella et al. [3] established a self-paced step test for the community-dwelling older adult, which is implemented at 40 cm height and requires stepping 20 times at different paces. A high correlation coefficient of 0.75~0.94 is found between the observed and the predicted maximal oxygen consumption (V˙O2max). Though the self-paced step test appears to...
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
     

Show less