RELAUNCHING SEA HERO QUEST AS A NEW RESEARCH EDITION
We’re super pleased to announce that Sea Hero Quest is back! This new Research Edition is aimed at large cohort research projects and for the first time, will put an incredibly valuable tool in the hands of new researchers worldwide in conjunction with a backend system to manage the captured data between researchers.
Sea Hero Quest is a mobile game designed to help researchers to understand the mental process of 3D navigation, which is one of the first skills lost in dementia.
The plot of the game involves a sea journey taken by a son in a quest to recover the memories his father has lost to dementia.
There are three sections: navigation, shooting flares to test orientation, and chasing creatures. Each has been carefully crafted to be as fun and exciting as it is scientifically valid.
Since its launch, Sea Hero Quest has been played for a combined total of over 117 years by 4.3 million players around the world. This amount of data would have taken over 176 centuries to collect by traditional laboratory methods.
Thanks to the continued long term support of the project, the Research Edition has returned to the Apple App Store and Google Play stores to expand on this impressive data set and allow further studies of cognition and spatial navigation for a wider range of disease types.
The novel uses for Sea Hero Quest go beyond our planet! Here’s a test project that was conducted in low gravity.
WHO’S INVOLVED?We’ve partnered with our long term collaborators at Alzheimer’s Research UK, the University College London, the University of East Anglia and BoldLight to build this milestone version of the Sea Hero Quest game — this new version is designed to live well into the future and builds on the award winning project so far.
We’re so proud to see Sea Hero Quest back in researcher’s hands with all these additional features and a power up that should make it easier for new people to get involved. The aim of the project is to provide researchers with a controllable and easy way to administer digital cognitive assessment of navigation ability from wherever they are in the world.
“The new Research Edition will allow even more research teams to get involved with the unprecedented Sea Hero Quest game and data set.”
In this Research Edition of Sea Hero Quest, players can explore a selected playlist of game levels to help scientists collect exactly what data they need from their test groups. The gameplay closely matches the original version so the huge database built by the original game can be compared against there’s also a simplified user interface for handling data collected from the game giving research scientists more time to look at data and less time building navigational tests.
“It’s wonderful to have this powerful new Research Edition of Sea Hero Quest out in the wild. The scale of Sea Hero Quest continues to blow our minds and shows the massive potential for science and healthcare collaborations with games.”
DO YOU HAVE A PROJECT THAT COULD BENEFIT FROM SEA HERO QUEST’S PROVEN TRACK RECORD?If you’re a researcher and you’re interesting in using Sea Hero Quest Research Edition, applications are open and it’s free to apply — Apply to run a project with Sea Hero Quest Research Edition through ARUK.
Originally published at on our previous blog site that’s now forever archived on October 12, 2021.
