D5.3 Data access protocol for accelerometer data, linked to survey data, conforming FAIR principles (Access to biomedical data)

This deliverable is a result of Task 5.1 of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) project, focusing on the legal, ethical, and technological issues of access to biomedical data. The task deals with the challenge of adapting the FAIR principles to the access of biomedical data available for the research community. As an intermediate step to the actual data access, this deliverable provides the data access plan for making accelerometer data available. This report describes the data access plan for accelerometer data collected within the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and aims to inform and guide other researchers, survey methodologists and data archives.

Besides many other information, SHARE collects a wide variety of information on health of the population aged 50 and older. Objective health measures have been an important part of SHARE from its beginning. In its eight wave, SHARE implemented the collection of accelerometer data to objectively measure physical behaviour. SHARE Wave 8 fieldwork started in October 2019. The first accelerometers were sent out one month later. In March 2020, the entire fieldwork was stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing regulations that prevented the continuation of face-to-face interviews (see Scherpenzeel et al. forthcoming). Accelerometer data differ from traditional survey data, as they cannot be released immediately after collection and data cleaning, but they need to be processed and aggregated using specific statistical packages. The raw accelerometer data may not be accessible to external researchers, instead aggregated information will be published as generated variables alongside the regular SHARE data.

This report shortly sums up the implementation of the accelerometer data collection in SHARE and describes how the FAIR principles are implemented in the access and documentation of SHARE data: the data are made “findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable” for the scientific community. Regarding user access, the generated variables based on the accelerometer data do not differ from the traditional SHARE data. They are freely accessible, and the regular conditions of use apply.