Underwater Treadmill for Exercise and Injury Prevention for the Elderly

This research is to develop an underwater treadmill for ageing people who have osteoarthritis problems or the elderly who need physical therapy or exercise by designing the structure of the treadmill to be strong, portable and safe to use. As Thai society in the present is becoming an aging society, most of the elderly have symptoms of osteoarthritis. This underwater treadmill device is essential to reduce knee injuries while exercising. It is also effective to use for walking or running as regular treadmill. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic made life difficult for the elderly to do regular exercise in normal fitness place or a public sport complex due to the need to observe the social distancing and vigilant COVID-19 prevention. In this experiment, a total of 7 subjects were used with subjects running on a treadmill (on land) and on an underwater treadmill (in water) developed for walking or running in water. Seven parameters are collected for both (land and water) running to compare the performance of both treadmills and their feelings after using an underwater treadmill with 7 parameters: 1) VO2 2) VO2 /kg 3) Heart rate 4) %Heart rate 5) Respiratory Exchange Ratio (RER) 6) Total Energy Expenditure (Total EE) และ 7) Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE). The results showed that the underwater treadmill had higher exercise energy efficiency than the land-based electric treadmill while running with the same speed. Moreover, the underwater treadmill can reduce impact on the knees with the help the water resistance and uplift during the exercise.