Friday, November 13, 2015

Charging Up Cancer Research

An Android phone showcasing
how DreamLab works.
Most of us are familiar with plugging our phones in to charge while we sleep, so that in the morning they can blare alarms to incite us to actually get things accomplished. From when you finally put the phone down til you wake up, your phone is still on, still idle. What if your phone could be doing something while you sleep? What if it could serve as a help in cancer research?

DreamLab is an android app that utilizes the time your phone is idle so it can analyze genetic cancer data. You can choose what you want to analyze, such as breast cancer or lung cancer data. It does use your data plan (unless you have Vodaphone in Australia), but such practices have been used before with success. Utilizing the power of smartphones would likely be a new innovation in research, as it liberates labs from simply having to use dedicated (super) computers, and crowd sourcing is free.

If you want to help DreamLab, you can download the app here! (Android only)
Original Article

1 comment:

  1. Finally researchers can take advantage of everyone having computers. I just downloaded this app, and I hope everyone else does the same. Hopefully the Garvan Institute of Medical Research also creates a program which uses laptops and PCs for research while they are in standby mode.

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