While we’re sleeping, our mobile phones generally lie inactive. It means millions of processors remain unused for many hours. Samsung Austria and faculty University of Vienna’s Faculty have joined their hands to use the processing power of these mobile phone. Power Sleep is a new app that enables users to donate the processing power of their cell phone while they sleep. The research purpose of the research is to decipher protein sequences in order to help medical advancements in genetics, heredity, biochemistry, molecular biology and cancer research.
“In order to fight diseases like cancer and Alzheimers, we need to know how proteins are arranged,” says Thomas Rattei, professor of bioinformatics at the University of Vienna. “This requires trials that need a tremendous amount of processing power. Power Sleep is a bridge between science and society. It promotes not only our research, but allows people in Austria to become part of the project and, at the same time, to do good in their sleep.”
The Power Sleep is associated to a network called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) that connects around 60000 PCs in the world and used their processing power for computational-based research. The app extends the reach of BOINC to include mobile devices, which Martin Wallner, senior director of IT & Mobile at Samsung Electronics Austria, points out are not necessarily much less powerful than computers nowadays.
He further elaborated that app is simple and straightforward for users. They can set the alarm easily from main screen but function of multiple alarms is not available. Option to set snooze duration is available plus a selection of alarm sounds. App also enables user to swipe through an information section about the project and to count the number of hours contributed to the project-a nice feature of Power Sleep
