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A video game to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease? The idea seems absurd but it has nevertheless proven itself. The Sea Hero Quest project would indeed make it possible to evaluate the spatial and cognitive performances of the players.
Playing the video game Sea Hero Quest – a smartphone game developed in 2016 for Alzheimer’s Research UK – could predict the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, researchers have found. At least that’s what the data collected from the 4 million users tend to show.
A spatial orientation game used by 4 million players
The game developed by Antoine Coutrot – CNRS Research Fellow at the University of Lyon – and his teams consists of memorizing the route of a boat on a navigation map to make it pass through different points. In a limited time, the player must steer the boat in a three-dimensional universe and reproduce the route as faithfully as possible.
A priori innocuous and good child, this game nevertheless makes it possible to detect, in people without any symptoms, an early sign of cognitive decline.
“It worked beyond our expectations. Between 2016 and 2019, more than 4 million gamers from every country in the world downloaded and played Sea Hero Quest.”says Antoine Coutrot on the site The Conversation.
Cognitive functions: gender and place play a crucial role
Thanks to this huge database, the researchers were able to compare the cognitive functions of people who grew up in a multitude of places.
They first noticed that players who grew up in the city have a less good sense of direction, although depending on the country, this is not always so significant.
They then realized that the socio-cultural dimension played an important role in the cognitive differences between the sexes:
“Numerous scientific studies have reported an advantage for humans at certain spatial skill tasks, but it has never been fully understood where this difference comes from. Thanks to the game, we were able to estimate the extent of this difference between the sexes in 53 countries. We noticed that the latter was proportional to the equality between men and women of the country in which we are located, as measured by the Global report on the gap between women and men of the World Economic Forum “analyzes the researcher.
Thus, if few gender differences in terms of spatial navigation were observed in the Scandinavian countries, the trend was completely reversed in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
A new tool to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s
Thanks to these results, the researchers were able to better understand the spatial cues of each player, according to their age, gender, childhood, etc.
Ultimately, this game could become a test exercise during a neuropsychological assessment looking for an early cognitive deficit. It should nevertheless be used”in addition to a global clinical approach to allow doctors to orient themselves more easily towards the correct diagnosis”.