VO₂FITTING: A Free and Open-Source Software for Modelling Oxygen Uptake Kinetics in Swimming and other Exercise Modalities.

The assessment of oxygen uptake (VO₂) kinetics is a valuable non-invasive way to evaluate cardiorespiratory and metabolic response to exercise. The aim of the study was to develop, describe and evaluate an online VO₂ fitting tool (VO₂FITTING) for dynamically editing, processing, filtering and modelling VO₂ responses to exercise. VO₂FITTING was developed in Shiny, a web application framework for R language. Validation VO₂ datasets with both noisy and non-noisy data were developed and applied to widely-used models (n = 7) for describing different intensity transitions to verify concurrent validity. Subsequently, we then conducted an experiment with age-group swimmers as an example, illustrating how VO₂FITTING can be used to model VO₂ kinetics. Perfect fits were observed, and parameter estimates perfectly matched the known inputted values for all available models (standard error = 0; p < 0.001). The VO₂FITTING is a valid, free and open-source software for characterizing VO₂ kinetics in exercise, which was developed to help the research and performance analysis communities.