Does the lung volume depend on how tall you are?

Principle

In this experiment, you are to determine if lung volume is dependent on gender or on how tall you are. For this, you are first to measure your vital capacity (VC) using a spirometer. Following this, you are to separate the measured values into two groups, one for males and the other for females, and take the average measured volume value for each group. Lung volumes differ from person to person. They are dependent on age, fitness, lung disorders and other factors. In this experiment you are to find out if the height or gender of a person influences the vital capacity.

Benefits

• Uses the same spirometer design which is also used in medical diagnostics
• One-way turbine system avoids infections
• All methods used in medical diagnostics can be performed
• Takes advantage of modern wireless data acquisition technology

Tasks

• Use the spirometer to determine your vital capacity in litres. Collect together your data and the data of all other tested students in your group.
• Determine the correlation between vital lung capacity, body height and gender

What you can learn about

• Vital lung capacity
• Medical survey