A physiological Assessment and Analysis of Stairs Climbing: Using the RAS and Efficiency of work done

Abstract

Climbing the stairs up to a second floor of the engineering building in Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, for classes has been a routine job for the students of Civil Engineering, and Industrial and Production Engineering departments. This they do as they rush to their classes for lectures, examination and other similar academic activities. The paper tries to assess the relative aerobic strain (RAS) on the students due to the climbing task at 3 different considered pace (causal walking (CW), keen fast walking (FW), and jogging (JG)). Also; the efficiency with which these tasks were carried out was analyzed. The result of the experiment on twenty-two (eighteen male and four female) normal healthy adults; within the age bracket of 19–26 years (mean = 23, SD = 2.064), and mean height and mass of 185.1 cm (SD 11.7) and 69.4 kg (SD 5.9) respectively; show that both the RAS and the efficiency increases as the pace of the tasks increases and vary from one individual to the other. Thus, in addition to some of the structural factors and aesthetics of design, fitness matching of individual to task with respect to RAS, as well as physiological efficiency of work should be considered when designing the stairs. Considering the result of the statistical analysis for correlation between pace and efficiency of work done; the design will have to incorporate features that will encourage the users to climb the stairs at relatively high pace for better efficiency.