This new app helps your smartphone cure cancer while you sleep

DreamLab, an app developed over a three-year partnership between Australia's Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Vodafone Foundation, uses your idle smartphone as a research center to help cure cancer while you sleep.

The app is available for free on Android devices and can be found in the Google Play Store – just make sure your phone is being charged while you download. Next, choose the types of cancer you wish to support (breast, ovarian, or pancreatic) and then select how much mobile network or Wi-Fi data you wish to donate. Each night, your smartphone will work to solve small issues that contribute to a larger picture at Garvan Institute.

The idea behind DreamLab is to pool together thousands of Android smartphones to create free processing power that could essentially produce a supercomputer to help researchers quickly crunch the numbers behind cancer research. The Institute said that with 100,000 DreamLab apps working on smartphones, they could process data 3,000 times faster than they currently are able to; with 5 million users, that number would increase 150,000 times.

“As a nation who loves their smartphones, we now have a tremendous opportunity to put them to good use and help find a cure for cancer. Together, we can come to a greater understanding of how to treat it more swiftly,” said Dr. Samantha Oakes, head of the breast cancer unit at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. “With the help of game-changing innovations like DreamLab, I am hopeful that we will see cures of certain types of cancer in our lifetime.”

While we’ve seen botnets before, this is the first app we’ve really been exposed to that is consensual and benevolent. Typically, this type of technology is used for malevolent purposes such as hacking, which makes DreamLab all the more interesting. Another key note we can make is that this big-data, cloud-computing app takes the form of something other than a GPS like we have previously seen with Google Maps and Waze.

Kim Dotcom, the creator of the file hosting service MegaUpload.com, also proposed to use the processing power of idle smartphones for his upcoming Internet project called MegaNet. He claimed that if 100 million smartphones installed the MegaNet app, it would have more online storage capacity, bandwidth, and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined. Now that’s impressive.

Source: Mashable