Let your idle phone help cure cancer as you sleep

Sydney: Imagine that your idle phone is helping power cancer research as you hit the sack. With a new app, Australia's Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Vodafone Foundation want to create a "supercomputer" that will use the free power from your smartphone to help speed up cancer research.

All you need to do is to download the free Android app called DreamLab.

Put your phone on charge as you hit the sack. Choose the type of cancer research you want to support like breast, prostate, ovarian or pancreatic cancer.

Now nominate how much mobile network or Wi-Fi data you would like to donate, Mashable.com reported.

Users can nominate data via their mobile network (50MB, 250MB or 500MB a month) or Wi-Fi network (250MB, 500MB or 1 GB a month).

The free processing power will help scientists at the Garvan Institute process cancer data about 3,000 times faster than they are currently able to.

"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," Dr Samantha Oakes, head of the breast cancer unit at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, said in the statement.

"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," Oakes added.

According to the Garvan Institute, with 100,000 DreamLab apps working on phones, the team would be able to process data about 3,000 times faster than they are currently able.

With five million users, that rate would increase to 150,000 times.

DreamLab is a three-year collaboration between the Garvan Institute and the Vodafone Foundation.

It not only provides free access to a crucial computing resource, it also has the potential to greatly speed up cancer research by the institute.

With 100,000 users, researchers will be able to crunch data 3,000 times faster than the current rate. With five million users, that increases to 150 thousand times faster than the current rate.

DreamLab is available free to download from the Google Play Store for all Australian Android users.