Hyde said, "It's nice not to have to have as a thing. Sea Hero Quest doesn't feature any in-app payments so you won't be stopped from helping the research by annoying paywalls. "The experiment itself is just going this way and then that and asking where you come from." It's so useful that Spiers believes someone playing this game for two minutes is the equivalent to doing five hours of normal research. Within a mobile game, the sample can be opened up to millions of potential players, which equates to a dizzying amount of crucial data. Traditional experiments are time consuming and, perhaps more importantly, expensive. However, limitations have meant it's restricted to small sample groups. Sea Hero Quest isn't a brand new innovation in terms of what it's testing, as research of this type has been attempted before within test conditions. Spiers is adamant that Sea Hero Quest isn't designed for diagnosis though and instead called it "an important stepping stone in the research." A new generation of research It could be delivered on a mobile device." "Maybe you live in a rural village in the mountains in China and you can't go to get tested – you won't have to come to a testing place. This game might be that important stepping stone to go to your GP in the future and get tested. Sea Hero Quest has been a joint project headed by German company Deutsche Telekom with the help of Alzheimer's Research UK, University College London and the University of East Anglia, and is designed to use the smartphone to solve problems that simply can't be helped with current methods.ĭr Hugo Spiers, researcher at UCL, said "You can't go to your GP and ask to be tested for dementia. "We want to start funding this sort of research that we'll need to fight this disease."