If you’re like me, a lot of mobile games can start to feel similar and blend together. You might jump from smartphone game to smartphone game, enjoying each one for a day or two before getting bored, running into a paywall, or some combination of both. When you start feeling like this, you might be tempted to start looking for a paid, premium game you can really sink your teeth into, or you might turn to emulation. There’s another option, though: turning to games that help dementia research.
Help Alzheimer’s Disease/Dementia Research With This Android/iOS Game
Sea Hero Quest is a simple navigational game where you have to track sea creatures and take pictures of them in order to help your father preserve his memories. At the same time, Sea Hero Quest is a massive study aimed at mapping “normal” navigational abilities for both men and women and a variety of ages, to ultimately help the diagnosis of dementia. According to the developers, (actively) playing Sea Hero Quest for just two minutes is equivalent to five hours worth of laboratory research. Considering the resources that go into recruiting participants and ensuring they have the same experience as other participants, this is not as far-fetched as it seems.
Do Good With a Smartphone Game
Anyways, specifics aside, the bottom line is that with just a few play sessions you can make a significant contribution to dementia research. When you start the game, there are 10 optional questions (first a set of three, then a set of seven) that ask about your age, gender, activity level, and other fairly anonymous aspects of your life. While they are optional, I suggest you answer them so that your data is more valuable to the researchers. Also, while you should tell your friends about the game, you should make sure that you’re the only one that plays on your profile while your friends play on their own profiles.
Sea Hero Quest Gameplay
So what’s the game actually like? Most levels consist of one of the following:
- Memorizing a map and then navigating efficiently according to it
- Finding a flare and shooting it back the direction you came from (according to memory)
- An infinite runner-type minigame where you have to keep up with a sea monster, then take the perfect picture of them
Remember, this game is meant to ultimately help diagnose cognitive deficiencies, so it’s not exactly one of the best mobile games out there. Considering that every level serves as a significant data point towards dementia research, though, the game is more than fun enough to be worth a play. Aside from the social good it does, the graphics are also gorgeous, so that doesn’t hurt either.
Anyways, Sea Hero Quest is free, so go ahead and give it a try! Even if you only play it for five minutes, you’ll be contributing the equivalent of hours of traditional dementia research. You might even have a little fun along the way.
Download Sea Hero Quest for Android or iPhone
