[Infowarrior] - ‘Sea Hero Quest’ hides dementia research inside a VR game

[Richard Forno]

‘Sea Hero Quest’ hides dementia research inside a VR game
Jamie Rigg, @jmerigg
10m ago in Medicine

On the face of it, Sea Hero Quest could be just another mobile game. Cheerful, colorful and with plenty of bite-sized levels intended to test memory and spatial awareness. But while you're captaining your little boat along snaking channels towards checkpoints, the game is watching you. It's scoring your spatial navigation skill, one of the first innate abilities dementia sufferers experience a deterioration in. The data gathered is contributing towards a better understanding of what 'normal' looks like -- the benchmark for navigation skill across different demographics of people. The organizations behind the game are now back with a VR sequel, and the goal of advancing dementia research even further with their gamified approach.

The data from all the playthroughs of the Sea Hero Quest mobile game is already revealing some interesting preliminary insights. Analysis shows differences in basic spatial navigation skill begins to show at around 19 years of age, suggesting that deterioration can begin earlier than expected, long before other hallmark symptoms of dementia start presenting themselves. Men and women also tend to employ different strategies to solve puzzles -- choosing certain routes over others to complete a level, for example -- and people from Nordic countries seem to be better than average at the game. These kind of observations are already telling scientists that different demographic and socioeconomic factors produce different results.

Sea Hero Quest VR has been created not only to renew momentum behind the citizen science project, but to also nourish a much richer dataset. The mobile game records changes in orientation as you wind your way through channels with a 22.5-degree buffer, partly because slightly erratic movement might simply be a product of finicky touchscreen controls. When you are guiding the direction of the boat with your eyes, however, control is more natural and so changes in direction are registered every 1.5 degrees. By monitoring much subtler changes in navigation, researchers will have a more detailed picture of how you went about completing a level.

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https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/30/sea-hero-quest-vr/