Calories calculation formula needed for a very cool free bikers app ;)

[nikpink]

Hi guys,

I'm pretty new to this forum so first of all thanks for reading my post.

I'm writing as I think you only can help me in my research, I need to figure out aformula to calculate calories burned riding using only the following parameters:

• Age
• Genger
• Weight
• Ride distance
• Ride time
• average speed (retrieved used ride distance/ride time)

I founddifferent formulas online but all of them seem pretty generic for male andfemales and sometimes take in consideration the heart rate that I cannot calculate.

Could you please help me finding out the best solution?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Nick

 

[Ravenbait]

You probably want to look at using METs and adding perceived effort in there as a factor to make up for the lack of heart rate.

Sam

 

[ColinJ]

Hi Nick.

I can't see how you could do it at all accurately without also knowing things like:

• Percentage body fat
• Amount of climbing
• Weight of bike, clothing, tools, drinks etc.
• Wind conditions
• Type of tyres

A lean person riding with a tailwind downhill on a road bike with slick tyres is probably going to use far fewer calories than a fat person of the same weight carrying a rucksack full of shopping and riding a heavy mountain bike with big knobbly tyres up a steep hill into a headwind at the same speed but your calculation isn't going to pick up on that at all.

 

[colly]

You could try reading through this stuff:

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2010/11/how-calorie-measurement-works-on-garmin.html

It is geared towards Garmin stuff but might prove useful anyway.