Subject: Medical and health sciences > Health sciences
1 article
ark:24975/genrxiv-2026-00002 · posted 2026-09-29Epidemica: An Open, Agentic-Ready Research Platform for Participatory Epidemiology Studies
Epidemica is an open-source platform for building study apps that collect high-resolution, multi-modal epidemiological data — including proximity contacts, survey responses, and, in a companion transmission engine, a simulated infection outcome — and for running interventions over that data. It is organised as a set of versioned data and protocol contracts, implemented once each in Dart client packages, an Elixir/Phoenix server, and a Python transmission model, so that a study is authored as a configuration document rather than a fork of an app. This paper describes the platform's motivation, its architecture, a reference application (a seven-day transmission game whose infections are decided by a real contact network rather than scripted), and a purposeful extension of that same contracts-first discipline to the agents that help build it: machine-readable convention files that let a coding agent work in this codebase without re-deriving rules that have already been paid for in debugging time. We report the platform's current state and discuss next steps and further directions. Epidemica is available under the Apache-2.0 license at: https://github.com/colabobio/epidemica