After a successful journey gathering data from 4.3 million players and over 117 years of total game play, Sea Hero Quest is now available for scientists to continue using this fantastic app as part of their research into cognition and spatial navigation.
How can you use Sea Hero Quest for your research?
Although the free consumer version was removed from app stores when the original project concluded, Sea Hero Quest has proven to be an invaluable tool for answering further questions in dementia research and other fields.
We have once again partnered with game developers GLITCHERS, University College London, the University of East Anglia, and web developers BoldLight to develop a bespoke version of the game for researchers to create and fully manage prospective studies, as well as access data in real time from an existing study.
Available for Apple and Android phones and tablets, Sea Hero Quest is an innovative way of rising to our greatest medical challenge. Start your own project now and collect data that would normally take hours to achieve in a conventional laboratory study.
This new version of the app will be available for players with an access token, generated by the Sea Hero Quest system according to the criteria and requirements of a specific project. Researchers will be able to invite a targeted group of participants to play Sea Hero Quest and generate data about their spatial navigation capabilities. Find out more about setting up your own cohort and study.
What is Sea Hero Quest?
Sea Hero Quest is a multi-award-winning citizen science project originally led by Deutsche Telecom, alongside GLITCHERS, UCL, UEA and Alzheimer’s Research UK. The project was launched as a way of helping scientists understand navigational abilities across the life course. Available for the public to play on mobile and in virtual reality, Sea Hero Quest was the first mass market game that allowed people to take part in scientific research on such a large scale.
Largest study of spatial navigation abilities
Spatial navigation deficits are common in the early stages of symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. Understanding how these symptoms manifest and develop has been limited by a lack of reliable data on how navigational abilities change in healthy aging.
Since its launch, Sea Hero Quest has been played for a combined total of over 117 years by 4.3 million people around the world, providing scientists with data that would have taken traditional dementia research 176 centuries to collect.
This powerful data set from people of all ages and backgrounds around the world is now being used to help create a global benchmark spatial navigation and improve diagnostic approaches to early disease detection.
This dataset will ultimately be available to scientists through an open-source platform – further announcements on this to follow.