A game to diagnose dementia!

DPA

A mobile game, of all things, is providing dementia researchers with huge amounts of data. Called Sea Hero Quest, it’s helping them understand how our brains navigate space and is being used to create a benchmark for early detection of dementia, one of the first symptoms of which is the loss of navigational skills.
Participants in the project are the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK, University College London and the University of East Anglia in England, and the German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom.
Developed by the British video-game company Glitchers and available for Apple and Android phones and tablets, the free game involves a sea journey taken by a son in a quest to recover the memories his father has lost to dementia. There are three main tasks: navigating mazes, shooting flares to test players’ orientation, and chasing creatures to capture photos of them.
As players move around the game, their position is relayed anonymously to scientists several times a second and analysed using a heat map to assess how well they memorize the different positions and find their way around.
Ultimately, the crowd-sourced database will provide scientists insights into a normal, healthy population’s navigational skills across age groups.
Since its release in May 2016, Sea Hero Quest has been played by almost 2.5 million people, generating a data set for which 9,500 years of laboratory studies would otherwise have been required, according to Deutsche Telekom.
Up to now there has been a lack of normative data on spatial navigation abilities in various age groups. When are they at their peak? And at what point is their diminution a significant sign of dementia?
From the data gathered by the game so far – evaluated by scientists at the participating English universities – it’s now possible to infer what level of navigational ability is normal at what age, says Dr Stephan Brandt, director of the department of neurology at Berlin’s Charite hospital.
The scientists have learned, for example, that 19-year-olds are the best navigators, reaching their destination 74 per cent of the time, on average, compared with 46 per cent for 75-year-olds.
“The next step will be to use the game to diagnose dementia on the basis of this data,” said Brandt, who wasn’t involved in their evaluation.
“Dementia is usually diagnosed in people aged 60 and older. But it starts much earlier without being noticed,” Brandt pointed out, adding that although dementia was mainly associated with memory loss, “it also affects spatial orientation and at some point the person can’t find the supermarket anymore.”
But is finding one’s way around images on a smartphone display comparable to getting one’s bearings in real life?
“I think a comparison is possible to a limited extent only,” remarked Dr Josef Kessler, a neurologist at Cologne University Hospital, who said navigating a smartphone’s small display was more difficult than using a conventional map, for example.
“And there’s also the matter of players’ unequal experience in using a smartphone.”
What’s more, a player’s score in Sea Hero Quest, designed to be an entertaining diversion, depends on his or her level of concentration. Frank Griesel, 48, played it in a train.
“What else can you do on a train?” said Griesel, who has played through all the game’s levels. “The game gets increasingly difficult, especially in rain and high waves. When you sail into a wave trough, you often can’t see the destinations anymore.”
Despite scepticism from some quarters, Deutsche Telekom has expressed confidence that dementia researchers will benefit from the enormous quantity of generated data.
“We’ve been active in the strategic field of health and digitalization for more than six years, and so we were able to give scientists an opportunity to use smartphones for research,” said Axel Wehmeier, managing director of Telekom Healthcare Solutions.
The game’s popularity has surprised him, he says, as no one had expected the number of players to reach seven figures.
Kessler, too, regards the internet as a useful tool for basic research. But he says he doubts that Sea Hero Quest is suited as a diagnostic test for dementia.
“In my experience,” he said, “even people with intermediate-stage dementia won’t be able to handle the game.”