Team:EPFL/Survey
Espress'EAU - Water quality survey
Respondents
On the 23rd of July, we launched a survey through our social media on general water quality in order to see if Espress'EAU would fit people's needs and how we should adapt it in consequence. In total, 151 people responded to our survey. Almost all the respondents are between 15 and 55 years old, with a large majority between 15 and 35 years old. As for the location, most of the respondents come from Switzerland or somewhere in Europe outside Switzerland.
Drinking tap water and its quality
First of all, we wanted to know how often do people drink tap water. From our survey, roughly 90% of the respondents drink tap water regularly, with about 50% drinking exclusively tap water. Additionally, more than 80% trust the quality of their water. Looking more in-depth into the data, people living in Switzerland consume much more frequently tap water, but also trust it more. However, despite the seemingly high confidence in tap water, more than 40% of the respondents believe its quality will get worse in time, with only approximately 25% and 20% thinking it will improve or stay constant. We can see that tap water is highly consumed across different parts of the world and that people start getting worried about how its quality would evolve. For this, we went on to see how frequently would people want to test their water.
Water testing frequency
One important aspect of our project was the frequency of water testing in small villages. As we already know following our exchanges with Quentin Morezzi, President of the AFSR , big communities (generally cities their urban areas in Switzerland) have their water tested daily. However, for small villages, water is tested once or twice a year. But would people from those villages want their water to be tested more frequently? Our survey indicates that for communities with less than 10.000 inhabitants, more than 3 quarters of the respondents would like their water to be tested at least monthly. As small villages usually lack money in order to perform those test, a low-cost device would be ideal in order to increase the frequency of testing. This is why we are aiming to make Espress'EAU as low-cost as possible. But what would be the cost people are willing to pay for a water testing device?
Cost
Finally, we wanted to see how much people were willing to pay for a device that would indicate the quality of their water. More than half of the respondents would pay less than 50$ to buy the device, while a bit more than 30% would be willing to spend between 50 and 100$. For this reason, we build our device from components that together cost between 50 and 100$, so that the Espress'EAU can fit people's needs and expectations.
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