D5.4 User friendly data release, including user guide, of one biomedical data set linked to survey data and including metadata (Access to biomedical data)

Collecting biomedical data in a social science survey is an enormous challenge due to ethical and legal issues that need to be considered. The ultimate goal is the release of the data to enable the research community to fully exploit the potential of these data. SSHOC Task 5.1 is dedicated to the release of biomedical data collected in SHARE wave 6 (DBSS) and wave 8 (accelerometer data). In the accelerometer study conducted in SHARE wave 8, a sub-sample of respondents were asked to wear an accelerometer – i.e. a sensor that captures acceleration – on their thigh for eight days. This procedure is a way to obtain measures of physical activity that are more reliable and comparable than self-reports of physical behaviour. However, it comes with higher complexity in terms of data preparation. This report describes the releases of the accelerometer data that were generated and provided to researchers since the termination of the data collection in spring 2020. First, as described in MS23, an internal release – called “Release 0” – was generated and distributed within SHARE team members in October 2020. In June 2021 the first scientific release (version 1.0.0) of “generated modules” were made available to the research community. An update of this data (version 8.0.0) – including additional files that provide more detailed information on the accelerometer measurements – is online since February 2022. The processing and release of the data are based on the data access protocol and the ethics guidelines that were elaborated in Task 5.1 at earlier stage (D5.2 & D5.3). Each release version was revised, improved, and extended based on feedback from users as well as our own experience in generating and using the data. A major extension are the additional datasets included in release 8.0.0 that provide acceleration measurements for 5-second intervals. The SHARE Wave 8 Methodology (Bergmann and Börsch-Supan 2021) that was released together with release 8.0.0 includes detailed documentation on the implementation of the study. For the future, it is planned to further extend the existing data with additional metrics that can be generated by algorithms (existing ones and those that may be developed in the future) based on the existing raw accelerometer data.