Confirming an accurate evaluation of Epicollect5

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Project Name (if applicable, otherwise just type n/a)

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Question

My name is James Bush and I working on my masters of software engineering at the University of Amsterdam. As part of my thesis, I am learning about existing humanitarian and citizen science software tools with the goal of providing an encompassing evaluation to enable informed decisions for small to medium grassroot organizations looking to adopt a system.

I am reaching out to you because I am including Epicollect5 in my evaluation list and I have some remaining questions about the intial development process. I see that Epicollect5 is open source and has a strong community forum for developer user interactions, but I am wondering how Epicollect5 was initially developed? Was it created with users? Did it follow any co-creation methods?

Additionally, I believe my assessment of Epicollect5 be accurate. However, if someone in your organization is open to reviewing it I welcome feedback! If applicable, I will attach it
to a follow up message via email (james.bush.ii@student.uva.nl).

Thanks for any help!

I confirm I have read the User Guide at docs.epicollect.net

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I confirm I have searched for an answer in this community.

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I confirm I have tried asking the same question to Perplexity AI with the tag #epicollect5, but it did not help.

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Thank you for your interest in Epicollect5 and its development journey.

Epicollect originated as a prototype developed at Imperial College London, initially as Epicollect, then Epicollect+, with the aim of supporting data collection in infectious disease and epidemiological research. Over time, the team transitioned to the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) at the University of Oxford, where Epicollect5 was developed as a complete rewrite from the ground up. This new version was built by a dedicated team who carefully considered the limitations and lessons from previous versions to deliver a more robust and scalable platform.

While Epicollect5 was originally created to support infectious disease surveillance, its general-purpose design and ease of use have enabled much broader adoption across disciplines such as conservation, education, and social sciences.

Although we did not follow a formal co-creation framework, user feedback—particularly from researchers and field teams—has played a significant role in shaping the platform. Key features are often guided or refined based on the needs of CGPS-led projects, but we also actively consider suggestions from our wider user community. The platform’s flexibility is a direct result of this iterative and user-informed development process.

For more background on the earlier versions of Epicollect, you may find these publications helpful:

  1. EpiCollect: Linking Smartphones to Web Applications for Epidemiology, Ecology and Community Data Collection

  2. EpiCollect+: linking smartphones to web applications for complex data collection projects - PMC

We also recently started collecting news and articles about Epicollect5 and we list them on our User Guide →