DreamLab is helping the fight against COVID-19. Scientists at Imperial College London have teamed up with the Vodafone Foundation to help gather research on Coronavirus, with the aid of smartphone users across the UK.

The Corona-AI project will be delivered through DreamLab, an award-winning app developed by the Vodafone Foundation in 2017 to facilitate cancer research.

DreamLab uses the collective computing power of its users’ smartphones to analyse complex data while their owners sleep. This gives scientists access to much-needed processing power when solving problems, such as identifying existing drugs and food-based molecules that may benefit Covid-19 patients.

For the project to work, users download the DreamLab app and activate it every night whilst they sleep. This collective processing power creates a virtual supercomputer, capable of processing millions of calculations.

The project is a two-pronged plan that uses artificial intelligence to research potential treatments for COVID-19.

The first step will be to identify molecules based in food and drugs that have antiviral properties that could be used to combat the effects of the virus.

The second step will be to optimise combinations of these drugs and food molecules to create treatments and nutritional advice that could help those who have been infected with the virus.

The first step alone, scientists from Imperial College London believe that if 100,000 DreamLab users power the app for six hours every night over a three month period, they’d be able to complete vital research that would have taken Imperial’s supercomputers a year to process.

When the research is complete, it will be made available to medical professionals with the aim to facilitate clinical trials, And, in addition, any findings from the food analysis will be released as dietary advice to help those recovering from COVID-19.

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