Graphic: Deutsche Telekom

The world’s first mobile game that empowers people around the world to game for good and help scientists fight dementia.

Human beings are living ever-longer lives. But this positive trend comes with some serious side-effects: The World Health Organization has classified dementia as one of the most significant threats to our overall health and well-being. Deutsche Telekom is dedicating its core competencies as a leading ICT (information and communications technology) company to help medical researchers address this problem and thus address the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3: good health and well-being. In partnership with Alzheimer’s Research, University College London, the University of East Anglia, and game developers Glitchers, Deutsche Telekom created the world’s first mobile game that has generated the equivalent of 11,000 years of conventional lab-based research.

Dementia is a global threat

The World Health Organization predicts that by 2050, one in three people is likely to develop dementia at some point in their lives. The effects of this debilitating condition are wide-ranging – from impacting an individual’s ability to form and access memories to performing simple navigation-based tasks – and cause untold anguish and frustration for sufferers and caretakers alike.

One of the key barriers to developing new, effective diagnostic tests and treatments for dementia is the lack of data available to researchers – to find treatments to slow or even stop the progress of the diseases that cause dementia, scientists require data that is simply not available. As an ICT company, Deutsche Telekom has unique leverage to help researchers tackle this exact challenge.

Gaming provides research data

The success of mobile games – global citizens spend an average of 3 billion hours a week playing games, increasingly on mobile platforms – inspired a simple, yet revolutionary approach: Integrate gaming with brain science, so that helping researchers fight dementia might become something attractive and entertaining.

Deutsche Telekom, having created one of Europe’s largest mobile networks, considered it as part of its digital responsibility to leverage its expertise, insights, and infrastructure to address this challenge. Its ambition was to revolutionize the way research data is collected, by getting people around the world to volunteer their data and time. Deutsche Telekom had the power and scale to give dementia research a radical shakeup, harnessing the infl uence of its network for good by creating the world’s first mobile game in which anyone can help scientists fight dementia.

The game concept

A critical success factor for the “Sea Hero Quest” game was to ensure that the science and gaming elements were seamlessly integrated. The answer was navigation. Navigational skills are among the first cognitive functions dementia sufferers lose. At the same time navigation is a popular gaming element. The game challenges and records navigational skills of players around the world. Through their play, the gamers provide anonymous data to create a human benchmark for spatial navigation, against which dementia can be measured in the future. The development of this benchmark is widely acknowledged to be one of the key steps toward developing new diagnostic tests for the diseases that cause dementia.

The backstory of the game involves a son and his aging explorer father, who is slowly losing his memories of his past sea voyages. Within the game, users retrace the Sea Hero father’s adventures by navigating their boat through five different themed areas. This simple, yet powerful tale of a son trying to save his father’s memories is a fitting metaphor for what people are doing in real life by playing the game.

In search of big data

For “Sea Hero Quest,” the objective was to build the world’s largest and most diverse dataset for dementia researchers. The largest previous study in this field consisted of only 499 volunteers.

To help achieve this outcome, the launch of the game was accompanied by a detailed international marketing and communications campaign, ensuring that the game would create an emotional connection with audiences and make it possible to empower people around the world to get involved and, for the first time, help to advance dementia research in a different way than by just making monetary donations. The launch activities took place across multiple markets and multiple media to embed “Sea Hero Quest” in the mainstream culture and conversation. This helped generate a positive buzz among casual gamers and ensured the engagement of our audience at scale over a sustained period of time.

Outcome and results

The game’s story went on to inspire millions of people around the world and has resulted in the creation of the largest crowdsourced dataset of its kind – and the biggest dementia study in human history. By the beginning of March 2017, the app had been downloaded almost 2.8 million times. Collectively, “Sea Hero Quest” has been played for the equivalent of more than 75 years, generating the equivalent of 11,000 years of traditional lab-based research. 

At the Neuroscience Conference 2016 in San Diego, the preliminary findings of the data analysis were presented to the global medical community, and the tangible impact the game has had on global dementia research was demonstrated for the first time. The analysis of the data collected by the game has uncovered exciting new scientific findings.

The game is now being tested in a clinical setting, paving the way for its use as a global diagnostic tool for dementia – one that crosses the boundaries of language and culture, harnessing mobile game play to help diagnose and effectively treat dementia around the globe. In addition to communicating the human impact of the condition, the campaign has provided a tantalizing glimpse of the innovation that games like “Sea Hero Quest” can offer, highlighting the potential of big data to help solve real-world issues and cementing the legacy of Deutsche Telekom’s “game for good” initiative.

For more information please visit: www.seaheroquest.com