DreamLab - Powering Research

Vodafone Foundation

About this app

DreamLab is a multi-award-winning specialist free app, that uses the processing power of smartphones to help analyse complex data while their owners sleep, to speed up cancer, coronavirus, and climate-change research.

DreamLab works by creating a network of smartphones to power a virtual supercomputer, capable of processing billions of calculations, without collecting or disclosing users’ location data. No personal data is downloaded to or processed from the user’s device.

As climate change intensifies, extreme weather events are becoming commonplace. Through our latest ‘Tropical Cyclones’ project, Imperial College London are building the world’s largest public database of simulated tropical cyclone events, to understand the risk of tropical cyclones and if/how climate change is making their impact worse.

In April 2020, following the COVID-19 outbreak, a Corona-AI project launched on the app, which uses the same technology to help in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak.

Ratings and reviews

Great app but occasionally will stop connecting & the "Connect me!" message appears as if there is no Wi-Fi or mobile data connection available when there is. When that occurs, if I open it through the persistent notification, then it appears to connect but just stays at 0 Calculations for hours & even several days, usually until a new version of the app is released. Once updated it starts working again. It has been doing that again the last few days, so I've been checking for an update often.

I loved the app I have taken part in projects like these for years. A few things need worked on. It does randomly change your research project you have selected. Then about 2 weeks agao it just stopped working. Same problem all of the recent comments, app won't start and if it does it says not connected to a wifi or cell network. I reinstalled the app still nothing. If it is not fixed soon or an acknowledgment of the problem I will delete the app.

The app keeps switching to a different project randomly, without my permission. That wouldn't be a problem by itself, but more recently that switch causes other apps that were open to crash. I've lost sleep and fitness data I was monitoring because of this. Dream Lab is currently unusable and akin to malware, which is a shame because I've had the app for so long so I know it's a new issue

What's new

- Minor bug fixes and enhancements