As players make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, the research team are able to translate every 0.5 seconds of gameplay into scientific data.
The team studied how people who are genetically pre-disposed to Alzheimer's disease, play the game - compared to people who are not.
The results show that people who are genetically at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease can be distinguished from those who are not on specific levels of the Sea Hero Quest game.
The findings are particularly important because a standard memory and thinking test could not distinguish between the risk and non-risk groups.
Lead researcher Prof. Michael Hornberger, from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said: "Dementia will affect 135 million people worldwide by 2050. We need to identify people earlier to reduce their risk of developing dementia in the future.
Current diagnosis of dementia is strongly based on memory symptoms, which we know now are occurring when the disease is quite advanced. Instead, emerging evidence shows that subtle spatial navigation and awareness deficits can precede memory symptoms by many years.
Our current findings show that we can reliably detect such subtle navigation changes in at-genetic-risk of Alzheimer's disease healthy people without any problem symptoms or complaints. Our findings will inform future diagnostic recommendations and disease treatments to address this devastating disease."
The data collected by the Sea Hero Quest app is vital for research - because every two minutes spent playing the game is equal to five hours of lab-based research. And having three million players globally equates to more than 1,700 years' worth of lab-based research.
The team studied gaming data taken from 27,108 UK players aged between 50-75 - the most vulnerable age-group to develop Alzheimer's in the next decade.
They compared this benchmark data with a smaller lab-based group of 60 people who underwent genetic testing.
In the smaller lab group, 31 volunteers carried the APOE4 gene, which is known to be linked with Alzheimer's disease, and 29 people did not. Both lab groups were matched for age, gender, education and nationality with the benchmark cohort.
Genetic risk for Alzheimer's is complicated. People (around one in every four) who have one copy of the APOE4 gene are around three times more likely to be affected by Alzheimer's and develop the disease at a younger age.
Prof. Hornberger said: "We found that people with a high genetic risk, the APOE4 carriers, performed worse on spatial navigation tasks. They took less efficient routes to checkpoint goals. This is really important because these are people with no memory problems.
Meanwhile, those without the APOE4 gene travelled roughly the same distance as the 27,000 people forming the baseline score. This difference in performance was particularly pronounced where the space to navigate was large and open.
It means that we can detect people who are at genetic risk of Alzheimer's based on how they play the game."
Gillian Coughlan, also from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said: "This research shows that data collected from people who downloaded and played Sea Hero Quest can be used as a benchmark to help identify those at a genetically higher risk of developing Alzheimer's in smaller groups of people."
Prof. Hugo Spiers, from UCL, said: "Our discovery highlights the value of bringing together big data with precise data to aid the development of digital tools for medical diagnoses."
MEDICA-tradefair.com; Source: University of East Anglia
