VR Game Gathering Data for Dementia Researchers

VR Game Gathering Data for Dementia Researchers
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New game Sea Hero Quest VR is helping neuroscientists design a new test for dementia, according to Bloomberg.

London-based firm Glitchers worked with researchers from British and Swiss universities, as well as dementia and Alzheimer’s charities, to create the game. Development of the free-to-download game, which is being released for Samsung’s Gear VR and Facebook’s Oculus Rift, was funded by German mobile carrier Deutsche Telekom.

As people play the game, anonymized data, including what actions they take and exactly where they look and for how long, is collected and stored on Deutsche Telekom’s servers in Germany. Players can also choose to provide the carrier with more detailed demographic data, such as information about their age, gender and location.

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists will analyze the data to hopefully learn more about how humans develop spatial awareness and navigate new environments. 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.

A non-virtual reality mobile app version of the game that Deutsche Telekom and Glitchers released in November 2016 has already generated data from 3 million people, which is far more than researchers ever anticipated. The vast data set has enabled scientists to begin to build a better picture of the distribution of navigation skills in the population. Holscher said that once researchers have created this baseline, it may be possible to develop a test that would use a virtual-reality game such as Sea Hero Quest to actually diagnose dementia.