Results on dementia research smartphone game
Last year, we discovered Sea Hero Quest, a smartphone app initiated by Alzheimer’s Research UK. Disguised as any other fun mobile game, Sea Hero Quest had a very noble ulterior motive – dementia research.
Upon its release, researchers were excited about the “unprecedented chance to study how many thousands of people from different countries and cultures navigate space,” as decreased special awareness is one of the first signs of dementia.
Late last year, months on from its release, the researchers behind the game have unveiled their incredible findings from its 2.4 million users – the data collected from whom would equate to about 9,400 years in the lab – at the Neuroscience 2016 conference.
The game involved players navigating their way through waterways and sending a flare back “home”. It also featured a challenge asking players to memorise the locations of ocean buoys then sail around them using only their memory.
Users at the age of 19 were 74 per cent accurate when sending the flare back to home, but this rate decreased year over year, hitting just 46 per cent accuracy for users aged 75.
Researchers found a few other surprising performance indicators, including that men, healthy people, people who live in Nordic countries and coastal nations had a slight advantage in retaining their navigational skills with age.
Dr Hugo Spiers, a researcher at University College London is hopeful that the game could function as an early diagnostic tool in the future. “The value of a future test built from Sea Hero Quest is that we will be able to provide a diagnostic for Alzheimer's dementia and a tool that allows us to monitor performance in drug trials,” he told the BBC.
Tell us in the comments below, have you been playing the game?
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