Epicosm—a framework for linking online social media in epidemiological cohorts

Abstract Motivation Social media represent an unrivalled opportunity for epidemiological cohorts to collect large amounts of high-resolution time course data on mental health. Equally, the high-quality data held by epidemiological cohorts could greatly benefit social media research as a source of ground truth for validating digital phenotyping algorithms. However, there is currently a lack of software for doing this in a secure and acceptable manner. We worked with cohort leaders and participants to co-design an open-source, robust and expandable software framework for gathering social media data in epidemiological cohorts. Implementation Epicosm is implemented as a Python framework that is straightforward to deploy and run inside a cohort’s data safe haven. General features The software regularly gathers Tweets from a list of accounts and stores them in a database for linking to existing cohort data. Availability This open-source software is freely available at [https://dynamicgenetics.github.io/Epicosm/].