Sea Hero Quest


The World’s first mobile game where anyone can help scientists fight dementia.


AWARDS

Gaming for good

Sea Hero Quest was originally available between 2016 to 2019 and continues to thrive as a platform for cutting edge research and earlier detection of spatial navigation decline for earlier dementia interventions.

Dementia is a growing health threat. Affecting over 55M people worldwide (135M by 2050), it is becoming one of the greatest medical challenges we face globally.

To help scientists working towards finding a cure, we created Sea Hero Quest in collaboration with experts — a mobile game where anyone can help fight dementia.

Sea Hero Quest is a multi-platform adventure game designed specifically to help advance the understanding of spatial navigation, and therefore understand one of the first symptoms of dementia.

Sea Hero Quest was developed in partnership with a number of world-leading dementia scientists, spatial navigation consultants and data security specialists (UCL, UEA, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Deutsche Telekom) and global communications agency Saatchi & Saatchi.


Biggest Dementia Study Ever


16K Years of Research Data


4.3 Million Participants


100k 5 Star Reviews

UI screens showing a boat going through a low poly lava environment, a sea octopus monster encounter and customisation of the boat in Sea Hero Quest, a mobile game helping scientist figh dementia by collecting data in a way that has never been done.

An innovative collaboration between science and gaming

Every aspect of Sea Hero Quest was designed jointly by our team and scientists from around the world.

As players make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, every second of gameplay is translated into scientific data that enables experts to study navigation in extreme detail.

Translating basic research experiments into an engaging game for a mass audience required a massive shift in the traditional game design process.

The challenge was huge and so were the results. Our innovation with Sea Hero Quest has become the benchmark for how games are created with science.

“We have never seen anything undertaken in dementia research at this scale before. The data set that Sea Hero Quest generates is truly unprecedented.”

Hilary Evans
CEO of Alzheimer’s Research UK

boat traversing a swamp biome
people playing sea hero quest on mobile
Building a spatial navigation architecture

To ensure the validity of the research methods within the game we developed advanced spatial navigational tracking tools, including a specially developed algorithm to collect and relay continuous anonymised snapshots of data back to the secure data centre.

As this data was required to be relayed over cellular connections, we needed to ensure the impact was light on users, while the transfer remained robust.

At launch, securely transferring anonymous data collected from the entire game was less than the equivalent of posting 1 Instagram photo.

mobile screen showing an encounter with a monster in the winter map of Sea Hero Quest
Designing levels around data

Understanding how the data would be analysed by scientists and processed by machine learning algorithms was key to building tools that created complete and relevant data in level design.

While each level was to be designed according to specific experiment objectives, we created tools that allowed us to quickly build these broadly from sketches and then refine them in collaboration with the scientists.

This method significantly decreased the time usually spent by scientists designing these experiments for similar studies.

FEATURES

  Research Clinical
Free to use* Yes
Commercial Use Yes
Fully Remote Testing Yes Yes
4.3m Benchmark Access Yes Yes
Raw Data Export Yes Yes
Longitudinal Testing Yes
Level Retest / Retheming Yes
Visual Outcome Measures Yes
Custom Question Sets Yes
eConsent Yes

*non-commercial use, ethics and project vetting required

spacial navigation data for dementia research
navigation data map
navigation heat map for dementia research
behind the scenes of sea hero quest mobile game

Selected Press


“Mobile game Sea Hero Quest ‘helps dementia research”

BBC News


“We have never seen anything undertaken in dementia research at this scale before”

The Telegraph


“This mobile game has the best ending: helping solve dementia”

Techradar


“Game shows that ability to navigate declines at young age”

CNN International


Play This Smartphone Game To Help Combat Alzheimer’s

Huffington Post

sea hero quest featured in the bbc morning show
sea hero quest game featured in a Sky News segment