Have you ever wanted to take to the seas on a global adventure? A new game available on smartphones worldwide from today does just that -- and could help dementia patients in the process.
The game, called Sea Hero Quest, asks players to set sail in search of precious artifacts -- in the form of memories -- which can be collected at different locations around the world.
As you progress through the game, scientists can use the data you generate to gain insight into your spatial navigation abilities -- one of the first skills lost at the onset of dementia.
The aim is to get hundreds of thousands of people playing from around the world, to identify what the normal range of navigation skills are among people in general.
Once that is established,
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Next step: Brain imaging
In the next stages of the project, Spiers would like to have volunteers play the game while having their brain scanned in order to see which parts of are active, and link this to patterns seen in the population worldwide.
"I hope to collect neuroimaging data from people playing this game to really understand how the circuits are activated as people play the game," says Spiers.
This is not the first use of mobile games to crowdsource data for scientists. Cancer Research UK have launched five games to date, including Play to Cure: Genes in Space in 2014, which obtained data as people traveled through space and helped identify codes and patterns along their way -- unwittingly.
This time, as players travel the seas instead of space, their navigation choices and strategies will be the data of use as they're set new and changing challenges to test their true abilities.
Sea hero quest, available on iOS and Android from May 4, was created in a collaboration between Deutsche Telecom, Alzheimer's Research UK, Scientists from University College London and the University of East Anglia and game designers
To navigate individuals needs the cognitive skill to process spatial information and sensory information and the physical ability to move the spatial organisation and to perceive sensory information. Through dementia these processes are reduced (Ing, 2011). So visual cues are a optimistic intervention to help individuals find their way more easily. Research shows evidence that individuals with AD have difficulty with wayfinding, yet can still learn their way if the environment is supportive (Davis & Weisbeck, 2016, O’Malley,., Innes, & Wiener,
Triggering brain functions, “visual motor tracking” or maneuvering through obstacles, Reaction time and memory. The purpose of this game is to strengthen the mind as we get older. Supported by the article “Beginning in our late 40s and 50s, our working memory dims, and we lose the ability to juggle simultaneous tasks. It becomes harder to screen out distractions, to stay focused while reading or shopping. Processing speed — that is, the brain’s ability to react to stimuli — slows.”
Games are even helping scientists solve real world problems. According to the article “ how online gamers are solving science's biggest problems” we discover that “ an online puzzle game about protein folding resolved the structure of an enzyme that caused an AIDS like disease”. This problem couldn't be solved by scientists in the past 13 years, but only took gamers 3 weeks. The the problem solving and strategic thinking involved in some games can be reused as skills in the real world. This article goes on to show finding data patterns like the game candy crush or a game called efe RNA to make shapes and understand genes. Games like these can teach and educate in some cases, but exclude the unneeded violence. Games can be fun and beneficial without the
Participating in a game night to socialize, play cards and eat pizza with my friends would use many different aspects of your brain. A few of these aspects include the Broca’s area, the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, and the occipital lobe.
Cranium is a game involving a wide range of brain activities as the players are required to perform the tasks as the go along the track. This game has been carefully designed to emulate the physical activities coordinated by the brain. For instance, in the game the players are requested to “enter the Cranium circle from the fast track” or “move clockwise to each [activity card] deck name” or “to complete the final activity in the Cranium central to win”.
In the game, you captain a boat and have to use your sense of direction to chart courses through desert islands, icy oceans and complex waterways, and the game sends anonymous data back to the developers. The findings on the first game were presented at an multinational conference with neuroscientists in 2016, and they showed that a person's
Beginning research proposes building design can support a person with dementia to navigate. Navigation or wayfinding is to find one’s way in the world. Seeing and understanding it is a restaurant is important requiring certain skills (Pollock, & Fuggle,
Dementia is a neurobiological cognitive disorder that primarily affects adults aged 65 and older (McInnis-Dittrich, 2013). There are currently 44.7 million people aged 65 or older as of 2013 across the United States. THe older adult population is expected to increase to 98 million by 2060 (U.S. Department of Health and Aging, 2014). The rapidly increasing aging population is largely due in part to advances in healthcare and technology, which have contributed to prolonged life. Unfortunately, due to the fact that individuals are living longer the prevalence of age-related illnesses, like dementia, are on the rise. Dementia currently affects five to ten percent of the older individuals with the prevalence of dementia doubling every five years
Neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley of the University of California in San Francisco found a game that was called NeuroRacer, he studied and examined the game and discovered that it could help the elderly to improve their ability to multitask and focus (Abbott 2013). According to Abbott (2013), studies have been recorded and shown how the patterns of the brain activity can change as the cognitive skills develop and improve. Sixty-five-year-old Ann Lindsey began to worry about how quickly she has become distracted, "As you get older, it seems to be difficult to do more things at once," she says (Abbott 2013). Lindsey participated in a study to examine whether playing a game could improve fading cognitive abilities in older, she was surprised and impressed
An iPhone app helped London scientists get a better understanding of Alzheimer's. A game called Sea Hero Quest centered around a sailor's memories at sea could be the first step in testing for dementia. By having the player try and navigate through buoys and other obstacles researchers were able to measure their sense of direction. From the game they were able to conclude that sense of direction being to decrease after you're done being a teenager and players from Nordic countries, where better health is more common, were better navigators. Unfortunately disorientation is a sign of dementia and Alzheimer's, but using the player's data they can spot early signs of dementia. The use of similar Alzheimer's diagnosis methods in the future seems
"The Truth About Video Games And The Brain: What Research Tells Us".Scientific Learning. N.p., 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.
Regardless of the positive or negative effects on the brain, People from all walks of life have benefited from the use of video game simulation. Video games have been very instrumental in providing both Physicians, Airplane Pilots, and Air Controllers simulated training scenarios in their perspective fields.
First of all, I think it can be good to be able to create a simulation of the human brain. It can be really good because we can see how a human brain is and we can also map every neuron to see where they are and what they do. What
They stated that the brain games have not shown a clear benefit so far in the study but they are not sure where the study really went wrong he thinks it is more of the way the participates went about the study. One overall finding was that people do not work the brain hard enough or over a long enough time period, “ it takes mental effort to practice to be able to see results” (Rebok). Rebok says if we can implement that long range, I think that there will be a big dividend eventually. Simons stated they did find a few good studies, which showed that brain games do help people get better at a specific task. He then gave the example of scanning baggage at an airport and looking for a knife. He says “ you get really, really good at spotting that knife” (Simons). Overall they got an even handed amount of results so some would say it would help and others would say it did not, I think for them to be able to say brain games helped they would need it to work for more than half of their participates.
But before that one must ask whether these games increase brain function to a beneficial point by examining the effects on one’s brain, one must also examine the changes in their performance periodically and lastly the practicality of the “brain games” (how easy and simple are they?)