Researching a person's breathing patterns while exercising is underway at ASU and could help health professionals rehabilitate patients faster.
When people lose physical capabilities and are trying to regain them, they usually go through physical therapy, said Nia Amazeen, assistant professor of psychology.
"You can imagine that someone who now has to use a wheelchair and doesn't have much fuel reserved [personal energy] wants to find an efficient way to do it [breathe]," Amazeen said. "If you can train them to use a particular pattern [of breathing] that is more efficient, then you can help them out."
To find the most efficient pattern of breathing, Amazeen started by studying the process of matching movements of exercise with breathing, which is called locomotive-respiratory coupling.
"If you couple when you're jogging, and you inhale when one foot hits the ground, you would exhale the next time that same foot hits the ground," she said. "And chances are when you exercise you fall into some kind of rhythm."
This rhythm can then be converted into a ratio. An example of a 2-1 ratio would be for every two times a person moves, that person has one breathing cycle.
Part of the study is to see if the mathematical model, the Fairy Tree, would apply to the ratios found with coupling.
"When this model was created, it wasn't attached to human behavior," Amazeen said. "Scientists like me try to see if there are some general behaviors out there that guide our human behavior."
In the experiment, Amazeen wanted to test if the ratio of coupling increases and moves along a branch of the tree as a person moves faster.
She said in the past this has been hard to study since consistent coupling usually happens when a person is experienced at the activity, such as running, and it's difficult to find a lot of experienced athletes for a study.
Participants of the study swing their arms back and forth while holding a weight and sitting in a chair. They must tap sheets of paper, called flags, a few feet apart with the weight.
Braces are put on their elbows and their wrists to restrict movement to just the shoulder joints in order to control the experiment.
"In the lab, different variables can be added to the experiment," Amazeen said. "The flag can be really wide apart or really close, the weights can be increased or decreased, the person can move really fast or really slow. And I can see how coupling changes and the amount of oxygen you consume changes."
Participants also have infrared markers attached to each wrist that sends information to a computer, which can be calculated to find out how fast the arms are going, Amazeen said.
In order to measure their breathing patterns, participants are outfitted with a mask that measures oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide exhaled and how hard the participate is breathing.
She said with the experiments completed thus far, she has discovered that as movement increases, coupling does follow along the branch of the Fairy Tree.
"It turns out when you increase the frequency you get 3-1 and when you increase the frequency even more you get 4-1," she said. "So it turns out you can make predictions about what people are going to do when you change the circumstances."
The next step is to see if one ratio is more efficient than another and if so, how to teach this breathing method.
Gary Septon, chief of medical staff at ASU's student health services, said this sounds like something that could be used in the medical field.
"It sounds like an interesting theory," Septon said. "It would be great if she could improve oxygen with less effort."
But he said putting this to use in the medical community is not an easy task.
"It takes a large number of participants to see if something new will actually have a positive effect on patients," he said.
Reach the reporter at susan.padilla@asu.edu.
