Welcome to episomer!

[lauespinosa]

👋 Welcome to episomer!

ECDC has launched episomer in 2026!

ECDC has developed episomer that allows users to automatically monitor trends of social media posts by time, place and topic, with the aim of detecting public health threats early through signals, such as an unusual increase in the number of posts. The current version of episomer collects posts from BlueSky using its API, and can be extended to support other social media platforms. It was designed to support public health experts with the early detection of threats from infectious diseases but can be extended to all hazards and other fields of study by modifying the topics and keywords.

Episomer builds on the objectives and core functionalities of ECDC’s epitweetr tool, which collected Twitter data andw as discontinued, and has been adapted to reflect changes in social media data accessibility.

Episomer includes an interactive web application, based on the R package Shiny, with five pages:

1. Dashboard, where a user can visualise and explore tweets, and download the associated outputs and data;
2. Alerts page, where you can view the current alerts and associated information, and train machine learning models for alert classification on user defined categories;
3. Geotag evaluation page, where you can evaluate the geolocation algorithm and provide annotations for improving its performance;
4. Data protection page, where the user can search, anonymise and delete tweets from the episomer database to support data deletion requests;
5. Configuration page, where you can change settings and check the status of the underlying processes;
5. Troubleshooting page, with automatic checks and hints for using episomer with all its functionalities.

🤔 Where to start?

• Read episomer user documentation/vignette and user manual

• Install episomer and start collecting social media posts

• Check our training material for videos on how to use and install episomer and other material about episomer, epitweetr and epidemic intelligence.

• Share your experience of using episomer with the episomer community

• Ask any question in the Q&A discussion

• Report bugs and/or issues

• Share your suggestions or ideas

• Share your related work on social media monitoring for public health

• Check what are the next planned releases

• Check information and materials from epitweetr. Some of these also apply to episomer.

  • Check the results from epitweetr v1 evaluation (peer-review manuscript)
  • Check an article on epitweetr in the Open Source Observatory
  • Check available translations of epitweetr v1 documentation

Happy signal 🔎 detection ❗