Academics

Discovering A Cure For Alzheimer's Using A Mobile Game App

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Alzheimer's still remains one of the most mysterious and difficult diseases to battle. Despite the recent advances by medical science, the cure for Alzheimer's is like searching needle in a haystack. However, scientists are not losing hope and they're teaming up with the tech industry to do that.

The Alzheimer's Research UK has collaborated with Deutsche Telekom and game designer Glitchers to create a massive crowd-sourced database on human spatial navigation. They will do this through a mobile game app whose primary goal is to record the behavior and responses of people around the world while doing the puzzle activities in the game.

The game is called Sea Hero Quest and tells about the story of a sea explorer whose goal is to help recover his aging father's memory. Together, they will explore and navigate the vast ocean while they go through various obstacles which include islands, icebergs, and volcanoes. This will give scientists insight how a normal person circumvents them.

Players will also move through mazes helping scientists evaluate spatial navigation and orientation skills. There are also levels where players will have to memorize locations and points in the map before navigating through them. This will help scientists assess the ability to remember and identify specific locations.

The organization said that this is a low-cost research to find the cure for Alzheimer's. Currently, there is not enough funding that goes into the research of the disease. This is sad since statistics say that more than 47 million people suffer from dementia all over the world and around 70 percent of those cases are Alzheimer's patients.

Through the mobile game app, the scientists hope to create a baseline for the spatial awareness skills of the general public. So far, they have already gathered 790 months of gameplay which is equals to 9,500 years of data. To date, more than 2.4 million people across the world have played it. However, not everyone has finished all 75 levels of the game but they were quick to point out that the data they have collected will bring them closer to the cure for Alzheimer's.

Sea Hero Quest is available for free both on the iTunes Store and Google Play.

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