Meeting Abstract
There is an increasing drive from funding bodies, learned societies and policy makers for more researchers to engage and communicate with the public. While many agree that this is worthwhile, there are a number of barriers to engagement as well as a lack of agreement amongst researchers on how best to carry this out. One such barrier is finding the time to take away from teaching and research. In the field of biomechanics specifically, the task of explaining complex physics and mechanical modelling to a non-specialist or young audience is considerable. With regard to research, it is commonly a struggle to recruit a large cohort of human subjects, representative of the population. Here we demonstrate an engagement model which simultaneously acts as an opportunity for the collection of large datasets for scientific study. Key motivations of the project were to address gender disparities between scientific disciplines studied at university; to demonstrate the relevance of principles in maths, physics and engineering to biology, and to collect a large dataset of human walking kinetics. It is thought that active participation can increase enthusiasm, knowledge and retention and, when it comes to human basic and clinical research, engagement activities allow access to a large and varied population of experimental subjects. Here we present a novel approach to engagement and its integration with active research, demonstrating our methods for engaging children and members of the general public in the maths, physiology and mechanics of human walking, and report on our dataset.
