Back in 2017 I wrote about a new game, developed by Deutsche Telekom, that had the potential to help identify people at the early stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s. The game, called Sea Hero Quest, has recently been the subject of research from the University of East Anglia, which found that the game was an effective early detection tool for various signs of Alzheimer’s.
The game, which was developed in partnership with University College London, Alzheimer’s Research UK and the University of East Anglia, has been played over 4 million times. It was designed to help researchers better understand how the brain works in terms of spatial navigation. Players are tasked with navigating mazes across various landscapes, with the developers believing that valuable data can be derived from every second of game play.
The research focused on people who are genetically predisposed to Alzheimer’s and whether they play the game in a fundamentally different way to those who are not. This is important because current memory and thinking tests fail to make the distinction between people at risk and not at risk.
“Dementia will affect 135 million people worldwide by 2050. We need to identify people earlier to reduce their risk of developing dementia in the future,” the researchers explain. “Current diagnosis of dementia is strongly based on memory symptoms, which we know now are occurring when the disease is quite advanced. Instead, emerging evidence shows that subtle spatial navigation and awareness deficits can precede memory symptoms by many years.”
Smarter testing
The study suggests that Sea Hero Quest was reliable and effective at spotting quite subtle changes in behavior among the different groups, which could not only provide a reliable means of testing, but also help to inform future diagnostic recommendations and even treatments.
The researchers go on to suggest that the data from the game is highly efficient, with around 2 minutes of in-game data equivalent to around five hours of lab-based research data. With several million players, that clearly adds up to a substantial amount.
The data showed that people with a gene that is associated with a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s, and what’s more, to develop it at a younger age, performed numerous spatial navigation tasks worse than would be expected. This is a crucial finding as those individuals performed normally on memory tests, so might have ordinarily flown under the radar.
“This research shows that data collected from people who downloaded and played Sea Hero Quest can be used as a benchmark to help identify those at a genetically higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s in smaller groups of people,” the researchers explain. “Sea Hero Quest succeeded where a conventional memory and thinking test failed. It demonstrates the power of harnessing large-scale citizen science projects and applying big data technologies, to help improve the early detection of diseases like Alzheimer’s.”
