The current global pandemic can leave you feeling rather helpless and that you’re not doing enough to help with the battle against the spread of coronavirus. But, if you own a smartphone, of which 79 per cent of the UK population do, there’s an easy way you can help.
DreamLab is an app from the Vodafone Foundation and Imperial College London which uses your smartphone’s power to aid research into diseases such as cancer. All you need to do is download the app and leave it to run on your smartphone overnight when you’re typically not using it: the app crowdsources processing power from the device to create a virtual supercomputer that conducts the research.
This virtual supercomputer can process millions of calculations for scientists at the university; if they had to do these calculations manually it would take around 300 years, but using the collective smartphone power, it takes only three months. Now, DreamLab is pivoting from cancer research for the time being to focus on Covid-19 research in the new Corona-AI project.
Speaking about the project, Helen Lamprell, trustee and board member of the Vodafone UK Foundation and general counsel and external affairs director at Vodafone UK, said: “We ask everyone to come together and harness the collective power of their smartphones by connecting to DreamLab. If everyone in the UK connects, we have the potential to really make a difference in the fight against Covid-19.”
The race is on to find a cure for the virus. In the US, president Donald Trump is currently touting hydroxchloronquine -- drugs normally used against malaria -- as an option to tackle coronavirus. However, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says there is no definitive evidence it will work. According to the BBC, there is insufficient evidence at the moment from current trials as to its effectiveness and there are also risks of serious side effects, including renal and liver damage.
The Corona-AI project hopes to contribute to finding a safe and effective cure for coronavirus. The first phase of the project will use AI to trawl data for existing drugs and food-based molecules with anti-viral properties that may help those suffering with the virus.
Dr Kirill Veselkov, from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial, who is leading the research, says the benefit of doing this research is that we already know existing drugs are safe and can be delivered to patients quickly.
Then, the second phase will optimise combinations of these molecules to provide potential drug treatments and nutritional advice for those with Covid-19.
“We have to do difficult and complicated analyses using AI 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 time frame,” he added.
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You don’t need to be a Vodafone customer to contribute to the research. If you are on Vodafone, you can activate the DreamLab app for free using either mobile data or Wifi connectivity. If you’re on a different network such as O2 or EE, you will be asked how much data you would like to donate to power the app, or simply connect via Wifi.
Using gadgets to power medical research is a smart idea and something the game Borderlands is exploring too. Developers 2K and Gearbox have teamed up with McGill University and the American Gut Project to help map the human gut biome using the new Borderland Sciences mini-game.
The game focuses on learning about the DNA of each microbe which inhabits our bodies. This DNA is encoded as a string of bricks of four different shapes and colours. Players then connect these coloured shapes to help scientists estimate the similarity between each microbe. Borderlands has around three million players and if they all contributed to this research, it could prove groundbreaking.
Download DreamLab on Apple App Store or Google Play Store now