Understanding Individual Heat Exposure through Interdisciplinary Research on Thermoception

Extreme heat events are more frequent and more intense globally due to climate change. The urban environment is an additional factor enhancing the effects of heat. Older adults are especially at risk due to their physiology and socio-economic situation. Yet, there is limited knowledge about their experiences of summer heat, their actual heat exposure and how they negotiate their thermal comfort through different adaptation practices. In conventional research about heat exposure and thermal comfort, very little attention is paid to individual behaviour and subjective experiences. To understand how older adults feel the heat we study their thermoception, which we conceptualize as an embodied subjective experience of temperature shaped by the changing interaction between environmental conditions and people’s bodies. This dataset stems from interdisciplinary research conducted in Warsaw and Madrid in the summer of 2022. We combined ethnographic research with gathering physical temperature data to show how thermoception is mediated by the interaction of older adults’ bodies with their environment through a range of adaptation practices.This dataset provides physical temperature data gathered during the study. Sensors supplemented the ethnographic study. In 2022, we recorded (every 10 minutes) the air temperature and relative humidity in participants’ homes using Kestrel D2 sensors (Warsaw: 10 May – 29 Aug; Madrid: 30 May – 29 Aug). The sensor data are tagged with indoor or outdoor. Indoor data represent the sensor data collected by the sensors installed indoors (in participants’ apartments). The outdoor sensor data are from the sensors that were given to the participants to carry with themselves when they are going outside.Further details along with the results of the study can be found in a journal paper with the same title published in Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.