Episomer

Tools for public health
Episomer turns social media signals into early public health action. It is an R-based tool that allows users to automatically monitor trends of social media posts based on time, place and topic.

This automated monitoring helps in the early detection of public health threats through the identification of signals, such as an unusual increase in the number of posts for a specific time, place and topic. 

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

This release of episomer collects posts from Bluesky using its API, and can be extended to support other social media platforms. 

The episomer package was designed to focus on infectious diseases, and it can be extended to cover all hazards or other fields of study by modifying the topics and keywords.

Contents

The episomer package includes an interactive web application (based on the R package Shiny) with six pages:

  1. The dashboard, where a user can visualise and explore social media posts, and download the associated outputs and data;
  2. The 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. The geotag evaluation page, where you can evaluate the geolocation algorithm and provide annotations for improving its performance;
  4. The data protection page, where the user can search, anonymise and delete posts from the episomer database to support data deletion requests;
  5. The configuration page, where you can change settings and check the status of the underlying processes;
  6. The troubleshooting page, with automatic checks and hints for using episomer with all its functionalities.

User documentation/vignette

User manual

Further information and material

Installation

The software is available as an R package under European Union Public Licence v.1.2 EUPL © The European Union 2007, 2016.

R was chosen as the computing platform to make the tool as broadly available as possible, as it is free, open source, and runs on any modern operating system.

To use an R package, R must first be downloaded and installed on your computer. In addition, episomer requires other software for using all its functionalities. For detailed instructions for installing the R package, please read the user documentation.

Option 1: Download from CRAN

For R users, an R package was released on the CRAN repository.

Option 2: Download from GitHub

GitHub users can download directly from the ECDC GitHub page.

Disclaimer

ECDC accepts no responsibility or liability  (including but not limited to any direct or consequential loss or damage it might occur to you and/or any other third party) arising out of or in connection with the installation and/or usage of this software.

Suggested citation

Episomer, R package [software application]. Version 3.0.34. Stockholm: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control; 2026