Determination of Metabolic Rate from Physical Measurements of Heart Rate, Mean Skin Temperature and Carbon Dioxide Variation

Abstract

Thermal comfort depends on four environmental parameters such as air temperature, mean radiant temperature, air velocity and relative humidity and two personal parameters, including clothing insulation and metabolic rate. Environmental parameters can be measured via objective sensors. However, personal parameters can be merely estimated in most of the studies. Metabolic rate is one of the problematic personal parameters that affect the accuracy of thermal comfort models. International thermal comfort standards still use a conventional metabolic rate table which is tabulated according to different activity tasks. On the other hand, ISO 8996 underestimates metabolic rates, especially when the time of activity level is short and rest time is long. To this aim, this paper aims to determine metabolic rates from physical measurements of heart rate, mean skin temperature and carbon dioxide variation by means of nineteen sample activities. 21 male and 17 female subjects with different body mass indices, sex and age are used in the study. The occupants are subjected to different activity tasks while heart rate, skin temperature and carbon dioxide variation are measured via objective sensors. The results show that the metabolic rate can be estimated with a multivariable non-linear regression equation with high accuracy of 0.97.