"Sea Hero Quest" is a mobile video game with a goal as grand as its adventure, to help find a possible cure for Dementia which affects people across the world.
Researchers from the United Kingdom have come together and want to study a person's sense of navigation which has been found to be a marker for Alzheimer's disease. "Sea Hero Quest's" main game mechanic is all about navigating the small boat of the player in order to find monsters and reaching the end point in a map.
Part of the challenge in "Sea Hero Quest" is memorizing a map. It also tests how good or bad a player's memorization skills are.
"Sea Hero Quest's" game date from the players is used to help accelerate the research for dementia, The Guardian has learned. Since its inception, the game already has over 2.4 million players across the globe. Officially, it could be considered as the largest dementia study ever to be conducted.
The game's polished art assets and gameplay mechanics also helped a huge deal in garnering the attention of mobile players. Players who give even just six minutes of their time for the game equates to around 16 hours of lab time which is a giant leap when all of the data are combined.
Researchers have also said that the current game data they have from "Sea Hero Quest" already saved over 9400 years of lab time, Telegraph reported. Dr. Hugo Spiers, who leads the study, said that the data from "Sea Hero Quest" has already given an "enormous potential" for speeding up the research for dementia.
Dr. Spiers told Telegraph: " The ability to diagnose dementia at early stages, well before patients exhibit any signs of general memory loss, would be a milestone."
"Sea Hero Quest" is free to download at the Google Play Store. Players are encouraged to give even just a couple of minutes of their time a day as it would help immensely in pushing forward the dementia research. As of this writing, the game already has 1 million downloads at the Google Play Store with an average rating of 4.8 stars rated by over 76,000 registered players.