Alzheimer’s and gaming
Spotting the disease early can help prevent the development of dementia. Professor Michael Hornberger reveals how he’s gamified symptom-checking with Sea Hero Quest VR
How an expert has gamified checking symptoms.
PLAY A FEW levels of Sea Hero Quest VR and researchers could detect if you’re at risk of developing Alzheimer’s. The mobile game was created by app developers Glitchers – along with Deutsche Telekom, Alzheimer’s Research UK and academics at University College London and the University of East Anglia – to gather data on spatial navigation, a key diagnostic aspect for dementia.
Right now, diagnosing dementia largely relies on memory tests, but that only catches the disease once it has started to take hold. The research, led by professor Michael Hornberger from the UEA, looks at how well players navigate levels – and with four million players, including 28,000 people in the UK between 50 and 70, the information adds up fast. Those who struggle to navigate specific levels were likely to carry a specific gene, which makes them three times as likely to be affected by Alzheimer’s. Catching that early could help them avoid the worst of the symptoms – which isn’t bad for a mobile game starring sea creatures.
How does the app work? One issue we’ve always had with dementia is we know that people with it suffer spatial navigation problems before memory problems. But how do we detect when people are changing from normal spatial navigation?
Games use so much intuitive navigation, so we created a game that measures navigation behaviour for loads of people. The different levels of the game look at different navigation processes and we increase difficulties, meaning it gets harder. We can also know which landmarks people use to navigate. It’s just an opportunity to collect a huge dataset for spatial navigation.
How would you have collected that data before? You would have to invite people from the public to your lab and test them on spatial navigation paradigms. That’s very laborious and uses a lot of time and money, as they need to travel in and, of course, not many people want to come into a lab environment. That’s the benefit of the whole concept of citizen science approaches – the game lets people contribute their own data for scientific purposes.
How does this data help predict Alzheimer’s? For our most recent publication, we had a smaller group of people who had a genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and others who didn’t have that risk. We looked at their performance in the game, and then we can compare how they performed to their gender, age or other demographic, because we have
so much data. And from that, what we can see is that people who are at risk are already performing very differently to the other people in the lab. The people with genetic risk don’t have any memory problems and no diagnosis, but we can already detect these changes – these are quite subtle changes, and therefore we need the big dataset.
How does that help people at risk of the disease? That’s the most common question we get from people: “you can diagnose me much earlier, but what am I going to do about it, because there are no treatments?” There are only symptomatic treatments, rather than disease treatments.
The important thing for people to know is that if you change lifestyle factors, you can reduce your risk of dementia by up to 30%. The earlier you know, the better you can potentially delay or alleviate your disease trajectory. The purpose [of the game] is to diagnose much earlier, and then use prevention, either via lifestyle or medication.
What else can the game data be used for? We collected every half second from each player, their position and heading direction, so you can get their trajectories and where they actually went. We can potentially use more predictive algorithms to see where people get lost and predict where they might get lost, to find out whether this could also help understand who is at risk of developing dementia.
All of this data was collected anonymously, and is all open access. It’s not only data for us, but for the research community, so other people can analyse it for the greater good. To play Sea Hero Quest VR, visit seaheroquest.com. Note you will need a VR headset.