DreamLab

Quantitative research with Vodafone customers and qualitative research with employees was conducted in order to test attitudes towards the concept, app experience, storyboard design and promotional materials.

These insights were crucial for the subsequent app development. For example, both the app walkthrough and the promotional materials proactively addressed concerns that were identified through this research.

One of the main goals of the project was to create an experience where making a meaningful contribution to cancer research was as simple as possible. We also wanted to ensure that concerns of draining battery life by using the phone\’s CPU were addressed.

Last year, DreamLab helped Imperial College London identify hundreds of anti-cancer molecules in everyday foods including oranges, cabbages and grapes as well as identifying existing anti-diabetic and anti-microbial drugs that could potentially be re-purposed to target cancer.

This project named DRUGS (Drug Repurposing Using Grids of Smartphones) combined Artificial Intelligence, mobile supercomputing, and big data to analyse billions of combinations of existing drugs and food-based molecules to help identify cancer-beating properties.

Earlier this year, DreamLab completed Phase 1 of its research into potential treatments for COVID-19. Since the \’Corona-AI\’ project launched in April 2020, DreamLab users crunched nearly 100 million calculations. The speed and scale of this research was made possible by around 140,000 devices completing around 1.3 million calculations every night.

To try and encourage more active participation on a daily basis, DreamLab constantly receives aesthetic and functional updates. Everything from the interface to the branding, the onboarding experience to the general look and feel of the app, its all continually assessed and improved upon.

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Vodafone Foundation wanted to refocus DreamLab in order to speed up the discovery of anti-viral properties in existing medicines and of anti-viral food molecules that could help fight COVID-19.

With a timeframe of just under three weeks, the team at Transpire worked tirelessly to tweak both the front and backend of DreamLab to not only ensure that brand new data could be processed correctly but also maintain the app’s seamless user experience.