DreamLab app lets you fight Covid-19 using your smartphone

Folding@Home is making headlines through its rapid growth – going from 30 petaflops to over 1.5 exaflops in the matter of weeks. The software is aimed at those who have an idle desktop or laptop and are willing to donate their computing power. Now Vodafone Foundation and Imperial College London scientists have released an app called DreamLab that lets you use the computing power of your smartphone, all in an effort to fight COVID-19.

Many are home in self-isolation and might be using their phones to watch videos or memes. There's nothing wrong with using a phone for entertainment, however, now the DreamLab app offers a ‘nobler' usage of one's smartphone – using the phone to help speed research into effective treatments for COVID-19. 

For those who aren't comfortable cutting down on leisure time there is good news, the app and all its functionality can be run during nighttime while being charged. That way anyone with a smartphone can help out in the strive towards finding treatments for COVID-19 as you sleep.

For those who want to get involved the steps are few and easy. Step one, download the DreamLab app. Step two, activate the app before falling asleep. There is no step three. 

Vodafone Foundation and Imperial College London are hoping that as many people as possible will connect so that millions of calculations can be processed to push the research regarding the infectious virus forward.

Dr Kirill Veselkov from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London, who is leading the research, says: “We urgently need new treatments to tackle Covid-19. There are existing drugs out there that might work to treat it; and the great thing about repurposing existing drugs is that we already know they are safe and therefore could get them to patients quickly. However, we have to do difficult and complicated analyses using artificial intelligence and all of this takes a huge amount of computing power. DreamLab creates a supercomputer that enables us to do this important work in a relatively short timeframe.”

DreamLab is already available and can be downloaded in the App Store for iOS or Play Store for Android. No personal data from the user’s device is affected or used in any way by the DreamLab app.

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KitGuru says: People have different reactions during a virus outbreak. Let's do our best to help each other out in these though times and work towards a solution for the benefit for ourselves and all the people around us. 

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