Fighting dementia with games: Sea Hero Quest
Hey guys,
Today I want to talk about a free smartphone game called Sea Hero Quest: available for iOS, Android and Oculus (VR).
Sea Hero Quest is a mobile game which contributes to research on dementia. It was designed last year by a British game company called Glitchers in association with Alzheimer's Research UK, 2 universities based in England and funded by Deutsche Telekom.
The game was designed to help researchers to understand the mental process of 3D navigation, which is one of the first skills lost in dementia. It was hoped that a large number of people would play the game, thus contributing much more data than could easily be obtained in a laboratory experiment.
The plot of the 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 sections: navigation, shooting flares to test orientation, and chasing creatures. Each has been "carefully crafted to be as fun and exciting as it is scientifically valid".
- Excerpts taken from Wikipedia.-
The game is visually very beautiful for a smartphone game and the difficulty ramps up very slowly, so it's easy to get into.
Every creature you encounter, you can take a photograph of and keep it into your journal.
There are variety of worlds and places you can explore, starting in arctic areas and travelling to sunny beaches and reefs.
Your ship is highly customizable and the story is fun and the gameplay is varied. The game also keeps you informed about personal statistics, research progress and has a leaderboard.
It's one of my favorites!
This is a great idea. Hopefully we’ll see some interesting research coming from this game soon. I wonder what else we could learn in the future by using games like this. The possibilities could get really interesting as VR gaming becomes more mainstream.
There was another mobile game called Genes in Space, that ran data for cancer research while you played but is now defunct. I think they gathered enough and called it quits. Hope they don't do that for this one here :-)
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