gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: The Integrative Human Circadian Daylight Platform (iHCDP, https://ihcdp.org/) is a collaborative, transnational project between the University of Basel (Switzerland), the Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen (Germany). It brings together scientists, clinicians and people working in the field of light and chronobiology, covering basic, clinical and translational research on the biological, psychological and societal impact of daylight in three distinct modules. As part of the collaboration, different human and environmental data are collected, necessitating the development of a common strategy and platform for harmonizing, sharing and aggregating data.

Aim: To support interactivity and reuse of study data within each iHCDP module and across the platform, a common Circadian Data Hub (CDH) for data upload and exchange is being developed.

Methods: The CDH will be designed to follow the FAIR principles formulated by Wilkinson et al. [1] to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. In addition to basic demographic data and specialized data like pupillometric and psychological data gathered by study staff, data will be collected from log diaries such as sleep and food intake, entered directly by participants using the participant-facing REDCap® platform [2]. Furthermore, data will be collected from wearable devices to provide light exposure and activity data at the participant level. Several workshop meetings were held to harmonize the data collection effort across institutions.

Results: In several workshop sessions, the requirements for the CDH were collected and discussed, resulting in a set of requirements. Metadata related to the data collected by the iHCDP modules was also collected and clustered. This documentation form will be used to describe the data for each project, which will be uploaded to the CDH. We implemented the openBIS system [3] on a server and performed initial plausibility checks to investigate the suitability of the openBIS system for the CDH.

Discussion: We selected the openBIS system for the CDH implementation because it supports the FAIR principles and includes an audit trail. It allows for the upload of data files as well as the implementation of database structures. Both will be useful within the CDH. Besides the implementation of further structures for the CDH, one of the next steps will be to develop and establish a data protection concept for approval from relevant authorities.

Conclusion: We have completed the first steps in implementing the CDH, a common resource for researchers within our collaborative project. The next stage is to test the openBIS platform, demonstrate the use of the platform to researchers and integrate the data being collected.

Funding: VELUX Stiftung, Switzerland (Proj. No. 1636)

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.