njit-etd2003-081 - New Jersey Institute of Technology

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subjects is somewhat limited so the data of 8 recruited normal subjects were used for
this study.
The testing of all the subjects was done in the Human Performance Laboratory in
Atchley room 327 of the Columbia Presbyterian hospital in New York City, NY and
included a Pulmonary Stress test on 30% supplemental oxygen as per the NETT
Protocol and HRV, BPV, and BRS.
The autonomic testing was performed in the following manner, as described in
each of the separate subsections below.
4.1.2 Data Acquisition
All exercise stress testing was performed on a bicycle ergometer with a SensorMedics
Vmax 229 series workstation. The protocol was a ramp exercise test with 5-minute
baseline data collection, followed by a three-minute warm-up at no load and then a
maximum exercise test at 5 Watts per minute ramp. All exercise was done on 30%
supplemental oxygen. The autonomic biopotentials were obtained through an interface
board (BNC 2080. National instruments Co., Austin TX) and fed into a 12-bit analog-todigital
(A/D) converter (DAQCard-700, National instruments Co., Austin TX) and then
into a Pentium computer (Hitachi Vision Book Plus, San Jose, California). Five-minute
resting data collections were also done in a counter-balanced order on room air and 30%
supplemental oxygen. Post acquisition data analyses were carried out separately. The
data were stored on the hard drive of the computer and daily backups were made to
Iomega Zip 100 Mbytes cartridges.