This alarm app for Android will help researchers fight disease while you sleep

Samsung Power Sleep

Samsung is sponsoring new alarm clock app that helps researchers fight disease while you sleep. Developed in partnership with the University of Vienna, the Power Sleep app uses your phone’s downtime to crunch protein calculations. Once set, it begins grabbing packets of data to crunch — which are about 1MB in size — then sending them back when the process is complete. The decrypted sequences are used to benefit cancer and Alzheimer’s research, amongst others.

It’s worth mentioning that Power Sleep is not the first mobile app that does the number crunching while the phone is idle. Previously, UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory released BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) that was used on distributed projects such as identifying asteroids and monitoring earthquake activity. Speaking of which [BOINC], Samsung Power Sleep relies on the same technology.

The application works on smartphones running Android 2.3 and above, and is available as a free download from the Google Play Store.