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Episode details

World Service,15 May 2018,26 mins

Harnessing Smartphones’ Power for Cancer Treatment

Digital Planet

Available for over a year

DreamLab, an app aiming to harness the power of smartphones while people are asleep, crunches data for an average of six hours a night, in an effort to develop personalised cancer treatments. It would take a desktop computer running for 24 hours a day at least 300 years to get through all the data, whereas it will take 100,000 smartphones running for six hours a night only three months to do the same. To discuss the app, Click is joined by Kirill Veselkov from Imperial College London and Kate Wright from Vodafone. Irina Fedorenko, Co-Founder of BioCarbon Engineering in Oxford, has been using drone technology to reforest the coastal areas of Myanmar. She tells Click that they can restore natural ecosystems in a fraction of the time it takes traditional methods. Nora Lindström, Global Coordinator for Digital Development at Plan International, has written about the importance for girls in developing countries not only to have access to technology, but also to become the creators of it. Her recent Op-Ed piece sparked by the recent Girls in ICT Day brings new ideas to the debate about the digital gender divide. Click talks to Nora Lindström. (Photo caption: A woman asleep next to a smartphone © Getty Images) Producer: Colin Grant

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