Deutsche Telekom launches new mobile game that helps diagnose dementia

Deutsche Telekom (DT), represented in Romania by operator Telekom Romania, has launched the mobile game Sea Hero Quest, that contributes to an early diagnosis of dementia. The release of the game was announced on May 5th during a press conference in Bucharest.

Sea Hero Quest is a multi platform mobile game specifically designed to help advance our understanding of spatial navigation and how this aspect of our brain works, as part of a coordinated effort to bring us one step closer to managing the growing threat of dementia. For many people living with dementia, one of the first effects they experience is a loss of spatial awareness, as they lose the ability to navigate their way through even well-known places and environments. Dementia disrupts the formation of new memories often leaving those affected isolated and disorientated. Creating a global benchmark for how we navigate is widely acknowledged as one of the key steps towards developing new diagnostic tests for the diseases that cause dementia.

According to The Global Impact of Dementia (2013–2050) report, dementia will affect 135 million people worldwide by 2050. New drug trials are underway that offer some hope of being able to slow down the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia.

In a process led by Saatchi & Saatchi London, every aspect of Sea Hero Quest has been designed jointly by game developers and scientists to provide insights about the way we navigate everyday.

Hilary Evans, chief executive at the charity Alzheimer’s Research commented: “We have never seen anything undertaken in dementia research at this scale before. The data set that Deutsche Telekom’s Sea Hero Quest generates is truly unprecedented, until now these kind of investigations took years to coordinate and at best gave us a snap shot of how a very small sample of volunteers behaved. The largest spatial navigation study to date comprised less than 600 volunteers. Providing the research community with access to an open source data set of this nature, at this scale, in such a short period of time is exactly the kind of innovation required to unlock the next breakthrough in dementia research.”

As players make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, every second of gameplay can be translated into scientific data by experts. Playing Sea Hero Quest for 2 minutes is the equivalent of 5 hours of similar, conventional research. If 100,000 people play for 2 minutes, each we can generate the equivalent of more than 50 years of this kind of lab based research.

“We knew that there must be a way of empowering everyone to share their time to help to move us one step closer to a breakthrough in the field of dementia. At the same time, we realized that if we wanted to achieve real scale and truly make a difference, we needed to make it fun for everyone involved. We needed to create something that would get people gaming for good,” said Hans-Christian Schwingen, DT’s chief brand officer.

All of the collected gameplay data will be rendered anonymous and stored securely within T-Systems data center in Germany to ensure data integrity and data privacy according to German data security law, one of the strictest in Europe, DT stated in a press release.

Sea Hero Quest is available globally for iOS and Android and can be downloaded now for free from the App Store and Google Play.

The game was created in partnership with the charity Alzheimer’s Research, University College London, the University of East Anglia and game developers Glitchers.

Otilia Haraga