Sea Hero Quest Photo: (You Tube screenshot)
Losing your ability to navigate and your spatial awareness is a common and difficult part of living with Alzheimer's disease or dementia. So if we can find an effective way to identify the initial stages of this decline, it could be a useful early warning sign of dementia and one day even become a diagnostic test.
That's the idea behind Sea Hero Quest - a navigation game that's racked up over a million downloads since launching last month. Simply playing the game contributes to dementia research. According to its website the game's so far provided the equivalent of nearly 7 thousand years worth of dementia research data.
Professor Michael Hornberger from the University of East Anglia is one of the creators of Sea Hero Quest.
