A smartphone game played by 2.4 million people across the globe has collected an unprecedented trove of data that scientists are using to develop a new diagnostic test for dementia.
Sea Hero Quest is a game for iOS and Android devices that plunks gamers in the ocean and asks them to navigate a boat through a labyrinth of rocky crags and bays to complete a series of tasks.
For scientists who developed the game, information gathered from players – such as how often they get lost and how well they find their way – is helping form a global benchmark for how navigation abilities change as we age.
That information is crucial when studying dementia because getting lost is one of the earliest symptoms of patients with degenerative brain conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
At the moment, there is scant data on how people’s spatial navigational skills change over time, which can make it difficult for doctors to differentiate between healthy memory loss and dementia in elderly patients.
“There are a number of fantastic tests out there that could help with diagnosis. What we seem to be missing so far is a really detailed spatial test,” neuroscientist Hugo Spiers, who helped develop Sea Hero Quest, told CTV News Channel on Friday.
“So this is the first attempt to really build a specific test that taps into that earliest symptom.”
In the game, which has been translated in more than a dozen languages, players maneuver a little boat through icy seas and tropical oceans as they attempt to reach checkpoints and photograph a group of mysterious sea creatures.
Players register based on their age, gender and country, and their behaviour within the game is collected anonymously and relayed to scientists.
Researchers were surprised by the results. Spiers said he expected players’ navigational abilities to drop off sometime in late adulthood.
“But that’s not what we saw. In fact, we saw from the earliest age in our sample in adult life, around (the) twenties, there’s just a slow, steady decline in how well people can orient themselves, how well they can remember where they’d come from,” he said.
“So there’s no age you should be particularly worried about in terms of losing your navigational skill -- it just gets worse over time.”
The research is far from over. Scientists behind Sea Hero Quest plan to spend the next year poring over gamers’ “way finding” abilities, or their ability to find various checkpoints within the game. They’ll eventually employ a spatial memory test designed by McGill University researcher Veronique Bohbot that pinpoints the different strategies players might use to solve a task.
Spiers is cautious about the findings and insists it isn’t a “magic bullet” for dementia research.
“It’s a piece of a toolkit that clinicians need that we don’t have currently that we’d like to develop,” he said.
He added that the findings wouldn’t have been made possible had it not been for the game’s global success. On Apple’s App Store, Sea Hero Quest has a 4.5 star rating and hundreds of positive reviews.
“And (it’s) thanks to the 2.5 million people around the world, including Canada, who’ve really given up their time to make that thing a possibility,” he said.
