New Course Software Goes to the Heart of the Matter

Curious about the effects coffee drinking, cigarette smoking, and workout regimens might have on our hearts? Using themselves, friends, and family members as study subjects, students taking Regulatory and Integrative Human Physiology this semester have been monitoring the changing activity of the heart under different circumstances, and viewing instantaneous graphic results on their classroom computer screens using new software.

>>> One from the heart--Lab partners in Regulatory and Integrative Human Physiology use new computer software to measure heart functions and analyze the results, which are displayed graphically on the computer screen.

"We took ECGs [electrocardiograms] of ourselves, then developed our own experiments," explained Laurie Lentz-Marino, FP fellow. "With my lab partners, we took ECGs of students of various ages: thirty-seven, twenty-nine, and twenty-two, plus my daughter, who's nine. We monitored heart rhythms and looked at computer-generated images which indicate the position of the heart in the chest. I was interested to find that my daughter and I share a similar heart orientation, and that my lab partners' were different." Other students are using the software, which records and displays cardiac and respiratory function, to compare athletes to nonathletes, smokers and nonsmokers, and the heart before and after physical activity. They are also able to use Clapp Lab computers to connect with online resources that provide data to compare with their own experimental results.

Biological sciences professors Kathleen Holt and Marilyn Pryor selected Intelitool educational software to enhance the lab portion of this new course, the first in human physiology offered by the College in recent years. The programs and equipment are so easy to use that students are immediately able to design individual or group projects in which they plan experiments, then collect and analyze data, without having to master complex program- ming or computer/equipment interfaces. "I was pleasantly surprised to be able to work with such high-tech equipment in an undergraduate lab," says Uma Pinninti '97. "I had seen similar equipment during my internship at Harvard Medical School two summers ago."

To get the software up and running before the semester, technical support staff from Curriculum Support and Instructional Technology and Desktop Technologies collaborated with Holt and Pryor on installation.