Where the Care App and Care Portal are mentioned, the articles in the Support Center refer to both the Academic & Basic Research Plan (Care Lab App and Care Lab Portal) and the enterprise Plan (Care App and Care Portal), unless indicated otherwise.
The availability of Care Portal access on enterprise is defined by the study configuration. For further information on your study configuration, talk to your Study team or account manager.
High-frequency raw data is uploaded to the Empatica Cloud every 30 minutes and then made available on the S3 Data Bucket for download.
If you’d like to know more about how to access the S3 Data Bucket, please review our support article Accessing data on S3, which provides an overview of the various recommended methods.
High-frequency raw data is delivered in Avro format. Within the S3 Data Bucket, Avro files follow this naming convention:
[participant_id]_[utc_timestamp_start].avroData and filename timestamps always use UTC+00:00
Always account for the time difference between the participant’s time zone and UTC+00:00.
What is an Avro file?
Apache Avro™ is an open-source project that provides data serialization and data exchange services. It provides a compact, fast, binary data format, that allows for a significant reduction in the size of the stored data files. Avro files (extension .avro) use high-level schemas which are stored within the files themselves; this process ensures that the file can be opened and processed later by any program (Apache Avro™ 1.11.1 Documentation).
Avro files are self-contained: they expose the schema defining the format type, and the sampling rate of the data recorded by EmbracePlus.
Avro data format is platform-independent, and it offers an official API for Python, Java, C, C#, and C++. It is supported for MATLAB interface as well:
- Getting started with Python: Apache Avro™ 1.11.1 Getting Started (Python)
- If you’d like to know more about how to access Avro files using Python, please review our support article How to access Avro files with Python, which provides an example script that converts Avro files to CSV.
- MATLAB Avro interface: How to access Avro files with MATLAB
- Getting started with Java: Apache Avro™ 1.11.1 Getting Started (Java)
- Avro C API: Avro C
- Avro C++ API: Avro C++: Main Page
- Avro C# API: Avro C#: Main Page
Avro files content
Each Avro file generated by the Empatica Cloud contains uninterrupted streams of raw data from every onboard sensor. The stream length is up to roughly 30 minutes, in case of recording interruptions, the stream may be shorter and a new Avro file is generated.
Raw data streams contained within Empatica's Avro files are the following:
- Accelerometer
- Blood Volume Pulse
- ElectroDermal Activity (EDA)
- Gyroscope
- Steps
- Systolic Peaks
- Tags [How tagged events data look in the RAW data]
- Temperature
Raw data Avro files also contain additional metadata, as well as sensor details:
- Participant Full ID
- Device serial number
- Participant’s time offset from UTC+00:00
- Sensors polling rate
- ADC IMU parameters
Full details of data contained within Empatica's Avro files are available in the Data Access Documentation, accessible from the Care Portal, on the Data Access Keys page.