Sea Quest Hero is more than just the usual computer game in which players find their way through mazes, shoot and chase creatures -- it also doubles as scientists' latest tool for studying Alzheimer's disease.
The game -- downloadable from Tuesday in its virtual reality version -- seeks to stimulate players' brains through a series of tasks based on memory and orientation skills, while gathering data to research dementia.
One of the first symptoms of Alzheimer's is loss of navigational skills. But data comparing cognitive response across a broad spectrum of ages is rare, and this is what the game seeks to provide.
The game -- billed as the "largest dementia study in history" -- has been developed by Deutsche Telekom, Alzheimer's Research UK and scientists from University College London and the University of East Anglia.
The mobile version, which came out in 2016, has already been downloaded three million times in 193 countries.
Playing the game for just two minutes, the website said, generates the same amount of data scientists would take five hours to collect in similar lab-based research.
With the equivalent of 63 years already played, scientists now have some 9,500 years worth of dementia research to go through.
"That gave us an enormous amount of information and it really allowed us to understand how men and women of different ages navigate in the game," David Reynolds, chief scientific officer at Alzheimer's Research UK, told AFP.
Resolving the tasks requires the use of "different parts of your brain and different parts of your brain are used in different ways by different types of dementia -- so it allows us to link what someone can do to what is going on in their brain," Reynolds added.
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