A video game to help research on Alzheimer's disease
Sea Hero Quest is a space navigation video game that can be played on mobile phones, tablets and virtual reality applications, developed by scientists from CNRS, University College London and the University of East Anglia. A new study based on data collected in the game showed that poor spatial orientation as an indicator can help early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, even before the appearance of any clinical signs.
How do we orient ourselves in space? Why do I get lost all the time while my friend never? More generally, why does the direction of orientation vary so much within the population? Is it linked to innate genetic characteristics, or modulated by cultural factors? To answer these questions, Antoine Coutrot, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory of Digital Sciences in Nantes (CNRS / Nantes Central School / University of Nantes / IMT Atlantique) and his English colleagues from University College London and University of East Anglia have developed a video game that has so far gathered 4 million players. The strategies put in place to succeed the various quests proposed by the game today represent the equivalent of 10,000 years of data collected in laboratories by traditional experimental means.
But how can we be certain that the success of the players depends on their ability to orient themselves in space and not on their ability to use a mobile phone or their habit of playing video games? To confirm their initial hypothesis, the researchers first compared the orientation performances of male and female volunteers of all ages, in the real world and in the virtual world, in Paris and London. Their results, published in a first article in PLOS ONE, validate their hypothesis: virtual orientation and real-world performance are strongly correlated.
Once the video game's interest in the assessment of guidance abilities was established, scientists then compared the performance of Sea Hero Quest players with those of non-insane people but with a higher probability of developing the disease. Alzheimer car carriers of the allele 4 of the APOE * gene. For the latter, tested in the laboratory, the scores on conventional neuropsychological questionnaires are normal. However, comparing their performances with those of Sea Hero Quest players of the same age, gender and country has shown changes in navigation habits even before the onset of clinical symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
These results demonstrate for the first time how large-scale numerical cognitive assessment could be promising for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease and help in the personalized screening of this disease in individuals who do not yet have clinical symptoms.
