A video game Sea Hero Quest against Alzheimer

Sea Hero Quest is a nice video game that the patient can play on the phone or via a virtual reality headset. But it’s also a lot more than that. The game developed with researchers will provide them with a mass of data of great utility in research against degenerative brain diseases such as senility.The patient Alzheimer can play this video game against Alzheimer.

Released in 2017, Sea Hero Quest is a terribly banal game at first, in which the player must guide a boat from point A to point B through a certain number of checkpoints. Arrived first on mobiles and then in VR version, it has however a big peculiarity: it was designed to target early forms of dementia.

Sea Hero Quest is a good video game against Alzheimer

The game challenges your sense of direction and your memory. You play as a sailor in the long course at the controls of a ship more real than nature. It’s up to you to choose the right road, to avoid the traps of the sea, to have fun hunting creatures in magical worlds, seas and swamps.

Behind the development of Sea Hero Quest lies Glitchers studio, a London-based team specializing in mobile games, backed by German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom and several European universities or foundations such as Alazheimer Research UK. Behind its simple concept – follow a given route on a map for a few seconds, before it is removed – the game has collected a huge amount of data, which will be used to identify very early those who may develop dementia .

For this, the scientific team that accompanies the game has chosen to compare the results of a specific category of people, carriers of the APOE4 gene, which promotes the onset of dementia (such as Alzheimer’s disease), with those of non-carriers. As a reminder, dementia is not a form of madness, but a progressive loss of mental and cognitive faculties. “We found that people with a high genetic risk, carriers of the APOE4 gene, had a harder time performing navigation tasks, choosing less efficient routes to different checkpoints,” explained Professor Michael Hornberger. member of the group following the project.

As a result, Sea Hero Quest has become a huge data repository but can also potentially be transformed into an effective detection tool to target people who are likely to develop dementia in the future. This is also what recently confirmed the American Academy of Sciences, and we can only be delighted that the video game is still a little more to the study of mental disorders.

The largest database

By playing, you will help fight a disease that currently affects 45 million people around the world. One of the first symptoms of dementia is the loss of guidance abilities. When you play, your orientation data will be collected anonymously, stored securely and combined with all other players in the world. The idea is to create the largest database in the world consisting of data collected from a wide audience on human guidance capabilities. This resource will allow in particular to develop in the future new diagnostic tools and treatments against senility.

According to the designers, two minutes of gaming provides the researchers with the equivalent of five hours of actionable data.

The game Sea Hero Quest is supported by the scientific community of University College London and the University of East Anglia as well as researchers working on Alzheimer’s disease. It is available on virtual reality headsets and on your iOS or Android mobile.