After a successfully gathering data from 4.3 million participating players, Alzheimer’s Research UK is making its ground-breaking citizen science app Sea Hero Quest available to researchers for studies of cognition and spatial navigation.
Sea Hero Quest started out in 2016 as a consumer mobile game to help scientists understand navigational abilities across the life course. By building a picture of how navigation ability changes in the general population, players could contribute to research identifying changes characteristic of early Alzheimer’s disease.
Originally led by Deutsche Telekom alongside Alzheimer’s Research UK and leaders in gaming, technology, academia and research, the award-winning app quickly became a citizen science phenomenon. The new platform creates a bespoke version for researchers.
Tim Parry, Director at Alzheimer’s Research UK, helped to bring the app to the public. He said: “We were really humbled by the response. It was more popular than we could ever have expected, and we ultimately collected data from over 117 years of combined game play. People from all over the world downloaded Sea Hero Quest and provided anonymised demographic information so that we now have an incredible wealth of data relating to navigation ability as we age.”
This new phase of the project aims to provide researchers with a controllable, sensitive, safe, and easy way to administer digital cognitive assessment of navigation ability. The system allows researchers to create and fully manage prospective studies, invite targeted groups of participants to play through an easily download from the Android or Apple app stores, and provides access to study participants’ data in real time.
Parry continues: “While clearly we embarked on the project with dementia studies in mind, we want to mobilise this resource towards the greatest possible benefit for global research. The app is free for researchers in any field, and we have developed a highly-usable study administration dashboard, with guidance and support for those looking to use it in their studies.”
Prof Hugo Spires from University College London collaborated in the development and validation of the Sea Hero Quest app. Prof Spires’ team has led the analysis of the anonymous player data. He said: “Our validation testing showed that performance in the game is strongly correlated with performance in real-world tasks. While data gathered from citizen science projects is inherently noisy compared to lab research, the unprecedented scale of the project so far means that our benchmarking data far exceeds the accuracy of previous research in this area.
“The citizen science element of this project has already revealed new insights into human spatial navigation at a planet-wide scale. We’ve found that these abilities are clustered according to economic wealth and gender inequalities globally, and this may have significant implications for cognitive testing in cross-cultural studies and multi-centre clinical trials.”
