You will need:
q Stopwatch
q Drinking straw (preferably a fat one)
q Clear tape
q Paper and pen
q Clay
The next time you want to check your pulse, don’t bother running to a parent or your school nurse. Try this neat experiment to measure your pulse rate with a few
household items.
INSTRUCTIONS
- First, ask an adult to help you identify the various areas where you can feel your pulse. It will feel like a gentle throbbing. Each pulse-beat represents our heart beat.
- Take a large portion of clay, about the size of a small rubber ball.
- For this experiment, identify your pulse on your wrist. It will be towards the inside.
- Place the ball-shaped clay firmly on the wrist so that it may stay firm. Tape it from the sides if required.
- Ask a friend to insert a straw into the clay straight, so that you may be able to see it bobbing gently with each throb of your pulse.
- Take 1 minute on the stop-watch and count the number of times the straw bobs up and down.
RESULT
The involuntary action of our heart contracting to push blood into the arteries, which carry it to various parts of our body and then expanding, is commonly known as the heart beat. The ‘heart beat’ can be felt in certain areas like the neck, wrist and temple, where the blood pushed through the artery creates a bulge, which we feel in the form of a pulse. A normal human heart beats 100,000 times in one day, and over 2.5 billion times in a span of 70 years.
