This week on the Health Tech Weekly Podcast I have a novel tool for you to try out in Australia that uses the processor of your smartphone while you sleep to help cure cancer. That’s right, you smartphone could help cure cancer. It’s only available in Australia right now but it’s such a great idea I can’t help but think it will be something that other researchers around the world adopt in partnership with local and regional cell phone carriers.
Cure Cancer While You Sleep
DreamLab is a new android cell phone app created by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in a special partnership with the Vodafone Foundation of Australia. The Vodafone Foundation funds health and wellness projects using mobile technologies. It uses the concept of distributed computing technology to crunch huge piles of data faster and more efficiently than a single researcher’s computer could on its own.

When you’re asleep and your phone is plugged in and charging, the DreamLab app downloads secure data to the processor and runs computing algorithms to search for things like genetic correlations to certain cancer treatments. The smartphone, along with thousands of others like it, run the computations and then upload the results, all before you wake up in the morning.

You can even designate the cancer type you’d like your phone to research and you can designate the amount of data bandwidth you wish to use based on whether you are on a wifi network or using your phone’s data plan. Vodafone is giving free data to any used by the app to its subscribers so they won’t pay at all for the app’s data under the partnership.

This is a win-win situation and could help all of us find a cure for certain cancers even faster. Check out the article for yourself, I’ll have a link in the show notes for this episode over at HTWeekly.com.

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