Alzheimer’s Research UK has teamed up with Deutsche Telecom and scientists from University College London and the University of East Anglia to develop Sea Hero Quest, a smartphone game that re-writes the rules on how we go about dementia research.

The pioneering project will mean that any one of the thousands of people who try the free Sea Hero Quest game can play their own part in an innovative piece of dementia science. Playing the game will help our scientists understand in detail how our brains navigate space, and help to build the largest crowd-sourced database on human spatial navigation.

Play Sea Hero Quest and help our scientists

People with dementia can face real challenges with navigation, and it’s a problem that can occur early on in the condition. However, we still don’t have reliable data on how navigational abilities can change in the healthy brain across life. Playing the game for just a few minutes will provide this completely anonymous data to help improve our understanding of navigational cognition. We’ll create a benchmark to help determine what goes wrong in the brain for people with dementia.

Alzheimer’s Research UK is helping support the analysis of the data the game generates, which could pave the way for improved approaches to early disease detection, in turn helping improve people’s chance of benefiting from new or existing treatments earlier.

Sea Hero Quest is an innovative way of rising to our greatest medical challenge. Currently available for available for smartphones and tablets, playing for just a couple of minutes provides what would normally take scientists hours to achieve in conventional study recruitment.

Find out more and download Sea Hero Quest now