Specially designed phone app helps detect people at risk of Alzheimer’s
A specially designed mobile phone game can detect people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease according to new research.
Scientists from the University of East Anglia studied gaming data from an app called Sea Hero Quest, which has been downloaded and played by more than 4.3 million people worldwide.
The game, created by Deutsche Telekom in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research Uk, university college london (UCL), the University of East Anglia and game developers Glitchers, has been designed to help researchers betterunderstand dementia by seeing how the brain works in relation to spatial navigation.
As players make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, the research team are able to translate every 0.5 seconds of gameplay into scientific data.
The team studied how people who are genetically predisposed to Alzheimer’s disease play the game compared with people who are not.
The results, published in the journal PNAS, show that people who are genetically at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease can be distinguished from those who are not on specific levels of the Sea Hero Quest game.
The findings are particularly important because a standard memory and thinking test could not distinguish between the risk and non-risk groups.
Lead researcher Prof Michael Hornberger, from UEA’S Norwich Medical School, said: “Dementia will affect 135 million people worldwide by 2050.
“We need to identify people earlier to reduce their risk of developing dementia in the future. Current diagnosis of dementia is strongly based on memory symptoms, which we know now are occurring when the disease is quite advanced.
“Instead, emerging evidence shows that subtle spatial navigation and awareness deficits can precede memory symptoms by many years.
“Our current findings show that we can reliably detect such subtle navigation changes in at-genetic-risk of Alzheimer’s disease healthy people without any problem symptoms or complaints.”