Telecommunications giant Vodafone Australia has teamed up with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research to release an app that would speed up the research on a cure for cancer. With cancer patients and deaths rising in proportion, many institutions and programs aim to find a cure and end the vicious cycle of this disease worldwide.
DreamLab, an app developed by Vodafone Australia and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, aims to speed up research with the help of a user's Android device. The app, which is a distributed computing project, makes use of a user's smartphone when it's finished charging. This will also automatically download genetic sequencing profiles that are provided by the Garvan Institute, and the information is then processed using the device's CPU. Afterwards, the results will be sent back to the institute so that it can be used in cancer research.
The app is currently available for free, and can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. Users can select which type of cancer research they want to spend their data resources, such as breast, ovarian, prostate, or pancreatic. Users will be able to nominate how much Wi-Fi data or cellular data they want to pitch in.
Cellular data options go for 50MB, 250MB and 500MB, while Wi-Fi connectivity has 250MB, 500MB and 1GB options. The data used by Vodafone Australia customers will be free, but contributing over WiFi will be taken against their WiFi plan. Vodafone Australia also notes that other functions in the app might still use a very small amount of data that will be taken against the user's data plan, while roaming on the other hand will incur international rates.
"With just 1,000 users DreamLab will process research data 30 times faster than what Garvan could do without it," Vodafone Australia said. At the time of writing, there are 26,525 people powering the app, which has greatly increased the rate of research to 803.0. You could just imagine how high the rate can go should everyone pitch in.
