This week was a busy week in terms of participants, with a total of seven participants. Each test would run very quickly, due to the numerous times we had carried out the procedure by now.
The participants we had this week required a very short time of familiarisation on the e-scooter, with each new participant requiring less time than the last. They seemed to be professional e-scooter riders! One participant stated that they had fun, which was a highly pleasant comment to receive.
There was some difficulty with calibrations on Wednesday, as the bag full of gas would keep deflating. This caused some delays with the procedure; however, Sam was able to fix this efficiently, which allowed the session to still run on time. It was quite hard to carry out the testing in the high temperatures, as the windows had to be kept shut when taking the gas measurements, however, the participants were very cooperative during these times. I and my fellow intern were also interviewed on this day, where we were asked questions about our experience here and what we hoped to gain from it. Additionally, we got the chance to show highlights of the procedure and explain the machinery involved, it felt like we were on the news! This allowed us to summarise our experience here and the key skills we have gained, which we could apply to our future careers. This was also a chance to promote the trial, in hopes of gaining new participants.
On Thursday morning we had another participant who had never used an e-scooter before. They also stated that they felt they had used more energy after using the e-scooter when compared to walking, which was quite interesting to note.
By the end of this week, we had a total of 19 participants, with just 6 more to go! It was quite an unbelievable feeling to know that we had finally come this far. I continued to put up more posters around campus, specifically where e-scooters were kept, in order to gain a few more participants for the coming week. However, two of the participants did not show up on Friday, which meant we had to reorganise the following weeks schedule. Fingers crossed we reach 25!
