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A virtual reality game and its predecessor, intended to help detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease, have accumulated more than 1,700 years of data over the two years of commercialization, according to its developers, thanks to its millions of players.
Sea Hero Quest was manufactured by the Glitchers gaming studio and Deutsche Telekom in partnership with University College London, the University of East Anglia and Alzheimer's Research UK. The game was designed to allow early detection of Alzheimer's disease in otherwise healthy individuals. The VR version debuted on the market in 2017 – according to Glitchers, virtual reality makes it possible to collect more precise data. The game consists of a series of exploration puzzles, in which the player receives a card, then has to navigate the world with the information collected, but not the card itself.
As the description of the game on the Play Store says, "One of the first symptoms of dementia is the loss of navigation skills. " The results, published in the PNASsay, "Spatial navigation is becoming a critical factor in the identification of preclinical Alzheimer's disease. " Professor Michael Hornberger, the principal investigator, points out how early it is to catch these diseases simply by identifying a person's movements in a room.
However, as they point out in the paper, it is often difficult to effectively study this early warning sign. A person at risk and a person at risk can hardly be distinguished from standard memory tests, and you should also consider the age, background, and gender of a person. But the wealth of data accumulated by the application means that scientists have greater access to players who meet certain criteria.
The researchers studied a demographic group of people aged 50 to 75, taking a baseline score of 27,108 players, and comparing them to the laboratory results of players with a specific gene or not. Those with this gene, called APOE4, are three times more likely to contract Alzheimer's disease, and at a younger age, than those who do not.
According to Professor Hornberger, the results between the two groups of laboratories were instructive: "We found that people with high genetic risk, APOE4 carriers, performed poorly in space navigation tasks. They used less efficient routes to achieve checkpoint objectives. This is very important because they are people who do not have memory problems. The performance of the non-operators, in turn, was very similar to the initial score.
With all these data, the researchers hope to be able to determine how to detect high-risk patients before they begin to experience the most severe symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and dementia later in life.
Sea Hero Quest VR is currently available on the Play Store and Oculus.
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