Among Holscher’s discoveries so far is that the relationship between age and navigation skill is even stronger than scientists had previously thought. Professor Christoph Holscher, a cognitive scientist at Swiss university ETH Zurich confirmed that it may be possible to develop a test that would use a virtual-reality game such as Sea Hero Quest to actually diagnose dementia. What we really want to be able to do is diagnose people 15 to 20 years earlier than we are currently,” said Reynolds.Īccording to Bloomberg, there is a non-virtual reality mobile app version of the game that Deutsche Telekom and Glitchers released in November 2016 and it has already generated data from 3 million people, which is far more than researchers ever anticipated. Even when symptoms begin to be noticeable, people often lie to themselves about the reason they’ve started to engage in compensating behaviors – such as relying on Google Maps for directions on a familiar route. “People aren’t aware of these changes because the brain is extremely resilient and able to find workarounds for damage as it gradually builds. Researchers believe subtle degradation in these skills may be an early warning sign of dementia and that information from the game could eventually lead to new tests to detect cognitive impairment earlier.Īccording to David Reynolds, chief science officer of Alzheimer’s Research UK, which was one of Deutsche Telekom’s partners in creating the game, things like brain scans helps us to understand that the disease process that underlie dementia actually starts 15 to 20 years before people are aware that they’ve got obvious symptoms. They believe that this process of analyzing the data should hopefully help neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists to learn more about how humans develop spatial awareness and navigate new environments. With VR they are capturing 15 times more data from the VR version because they are separating out where the head looks and where the boat’s moving. Max Scott-Slade, from Glitchers, worked with research scientists at University College London, University of East Anglia and ETH Zurich says that the value for them is to create this much richer dataset. The challenge is to use your sense of direction to chart a course through complex waterways, desert islands, icy oceans and even feed hotdog-loving sea monsters. In the virtual world of Sea Hero Quest VR you captain a boat. Players can also choose to provide the carrier with more detailed demographic data, such as information about their age, gender and location.
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As you play the game, anonymized data, including what actions you take and places where you look and for how long, is collected and stored on Deutsche Telekom’s servers in Germany.
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Sea Hero Quest VR is designed to test one of the first things to go with dementia – the ability to navigate. Development of the free-to-download game, which is released for Samsung Gear VR headset and Facebook’s Oculus Rift, was funded by German mobile carrier Deutsche Telekom AG. London-based game design firm Glitchers worked with scientists from British and Swiss universities, as well as dementia and Alzheimer’s charities, to create Sea Hero Quest VR – a virtual reality computer game as part of the world’s biggest dementia research experiment. This is usually referred most common Alzheimer disease, that damages different areas of the brain leading to a variety of challenging symptoms. What if you could delay the onset of dementia – not with a drug, but by playing a video game or maybe, even entering the virtual reality? The real reality is that dementia is a condition caused by diseases.
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It might sound like from the sci-fi movie, but there is always the ‘what if’question. During the years of researching, studies had indicated that those kind of training games are boosting the memory, sharpening the mind and potentially preventing cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s.
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It hasn’t been long since Virtual Reality became a vital part of gaming industry as such. Why wouldn’t we let this opportunities into our lives, not just for fun – but for solving health issues? Video games have been known to have a wide variety of effects on the mind of people. When you’re in the mood to play a game, you can – all you have to do is open the select app and start playing. Nowadays it’s perfectly normal to have a laptop on your desk, a tablet in your bag and a smart phone in your pocket.