New app utilises phone processor for medical research while user sleeps

A new app has been developed that allows users to donate the processing power of their mobile phone for scientific research while they sleep.

Mobile phones lie dormant when users are asleep, which means that millions of powerful processors are going unused for hours at a time.

The University of Vienna's Faculty of Life Sciences and Samsung Austria are teaming up to tap the potential of all that unused processing power.

They developed the 'Power Sleep' app which provides users with a simple alarm clock function.

When the alarm is set and the user's phone is plugged in, fully charged and connected to a Wi-Fi network, the app begins to process data sent from the Similarity Matrix of Proteins (SIMAP) database.

Power Sleep is connected to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), a network that links around 60,000 PCs worldwide and harnesses their processing power for computational-based research.

The app can be downloaded from Play Store.