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This Free Mobile Game Is Crowd-Sourcing Decades' Worth Of Dementia Research

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Researchers from University College London, the University of East Anglia, and Alzheimer's Research UK are tackling an age-old problem in dementia research--namely, distinguishing between the effects of 'normal' mental aging and the kinds of navigational difficulties caused by dementia--with a very modern (and fun) method: free mobile gaming.

Launched last week, 'Sea Hero Quest' has been downloaded over 600,000 times via the Play Store and App Store, and the scientists behind the game say that as few as two minutes of game play per user have already allowed them to (anonymously) collect the kind of data pool that'd normally require decades' worth of traditional clinical studies.

The mostly visual and auditory game was developed by the team at UK-based Glitchers, and puts players on a mission to seek out mystical sea creatures once recorded by the main character's father, requiring them to navigate familiar and unfamiliar areas. Users can cruise the game's Golden Shores, Arctic Rivers, and other magical zones while chasing monsters and managing their ship and starfish stores--tasks that can help researchers determine average levels of orientation and navigational ability among different age and demographic groups. 

University College London neuroscientist Huge Spiers explained to Gizmodo UK that the goal of establishing 'normal' levels of ability for spatial navigation is to help researchers home in on potential new tools for diagnosing and treating dementia, which can often start diminishing a person's ability to orient and navigate themselves from memory in its earliest stages. "While you're trying to find these sea monsters, the game tracks where you are in the world and which direction you are facing,” Spiers told the site. “That information about where you are gets relayed back to our science team where we crunch through that data to try and benchmark how everybody playing the game is navigating." He continued,

We're hoping to learn from the data how well people do at different ages, across men and women, and different places in the world and that will give us this really wonderful database. This is something nobody has ever done before and I'm very proud that we're doing this in the UK.

And while the game has only been around for less than two weeks, it's already gained insights into human spatial navigation abilities that're well beyond its age. Michael Hornberger, professor of dementia research at the University of East Anglia and one of the game's co-creators, told The Takeaway that users have helped generate about 70 years' worth of data for helping understand and fight dementia, the symptoms of which affect more than 57 million persons worldwide and the overall costs of which may grow by a trillion dollars within a few years. 

Think both you and your inbox could stand to take a few minutes apart? The swashbuckling research tool (and its genuinely neat monsters) is available free via the Play and App stores.