OREANDA-NEWS. Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading telecommunication companies, has launched an innovative new mobile game Sea Hero Quest, where fun gameplay also contributes to very good cause. The release of the game was announced today. Sea Hero Quest is a multi platform mobile game specifically designed to help advance our understanding of spatial navigation and how this aspect of our brain works, as part of a coordinated effort to bring us one step closer to managing the growing threat of dementia.

According to the The Global Impact of Dementia (2013–2050) report, dementia will affect 135 Million people worldwide by 2050. Dementia disrupts the formation of new memories often leaving those affected isolated and disorientated. For many people living with dementia, one of the first effects they experience is a loss of spatial awareness, as they lose the ability to navigate their way through even well-known places and environments.

Creating a global benchmark for how we navigate is widely acknowledged as one of the key steps towards developing new diagnostic tests for the diseases that cause dementia. New drug trials are underway that offer some hope of being able to slow the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia. Should trials prove successful, early and timely diagnosis will remain a barrier in our ability to effectively deploy these new drugs. Dementia is a condition that robs those we love of the ability to share their memories. Deutsche Telekom believes that innovative technology and new services can have the ability to transform everyone’s lives for the better.

In a keynote address given at re:publica Berlin, Hans-Christian Schwingen, Deutsche Telekom’s Chief Brand Officer said: "Deutsche Telekom believe in the power of sharing. We knew that there must be a way of empowering everyone to share their time to help to move us one step closer to a breakthrough in the field of dementia. At the same time, we realised that if we wanted to achieve real scale and truly make a difference, we needed to make it fun for everyone involved. We needed to create something that would get people gaming for good."

In a process led by Saatchi & Saatchi London, every aspect of Sea Hero Quest has been designed jointly by game developers and scientists to provide insights about the way we navigate everyday. As players make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, every second of gameplay can be translated into scientific data by experts. Playing Sea Hero Quest for 2 minutes equates to 5 hours of similar, conventional research. If 100,000 people play for 2 minutes each we can generate the equivalent of more than 50 years of this kind of lab based research.

Hilary Evans, Chief Executive at the charity Alzheimer’s Research commented: "We have never seen anything undertaken in dementia research at this scale before. The data set that Deutsche Telekom’s Sea Hero Quest generates is truly unprecedented, until now these kind of investigations took years to coordinate and at best gave us a snap shot of how a very small sample of volunteers behaved. The largest spatial navigation study to date comprised less than 600 volunteers. Providing the research community with access to an open source data set of this nature, at this scale, in such a short period of time is exactly the kind of innovation required to unlock the next breakthrough in dementia research".

All of the gameplay data collected will be anonymised and stored securely within T-Systems data center in Germany to ensure data integrity and data privacy according to German data security law, one of the strictest in Europe.

Sea Hero Quest is available globally for iOS and Android and can be downloaded now for free from the App Store and Google Play.

About Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with more than 156 million mobile customers, 29 million fixed-network lines and around 18 million broadband lines (as of December 31, 2015). The Group provides fixed-network/broadband, mobile communications, Internet, and Internet-based TV products and services for consumers, and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in more than 50 countries and has around 225,200 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenues of EUR 69.2 billion in the 2015 financial year – around 64 percent of it outside Germany.

About Saatchi & Saatchi (SSF Group)
Saatchi & Saatchi London is known for its strength in creating Loyalty Beyond Reason for its clients’ brands, creating powerful and profitable relationships by improving the quality and quantity of conversations that take place about these brands. Saatchi & Saatchi's clients include EE, Kerry Foods, HSBC, Procter & Gamble, Toyota and Visa. The Saatchi & Saatchi network has 130 offices in 70 countries and 6,500 employees. Saatchi & Saatchi London is part of the SSF Group, a mini group within the Publicis Groupe that unites Saatchi & Saatchi and Fallon. 

About Alzheimer’s Research UK
Alzheimer’s Research UK is one of the world’s leading charity funders of biomedical dementia research. The charity’s pioneering work focuses on prevention, treatment and cure of Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Alzheimer’s Research UK is energising a movement across society to support, fund and take part in dementia research and the charity aims to empower people across all generations through greater understanding of dementia.

About Glitchers
GLITCHERS was founded with the intention of creating products that have real purpose and make some kind of creative or technological leap.Our passion for doing this has seen us releasing lots of our own ideas – and that has led to collaborations with some of the world’s most forward-thinking people, institutions and brands.  

About University College London (UCL)
UCL was founded in 1826. We were the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to open up university education to those previously excluded from it, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. We are among the world's top universities, as reflected by performance in a range of international rankings and tables. UCL currently has over 35,000 students from 150 countries and over 11,000 staff. Our annual income is more than ?1 billion. 

About The University of East Anglia (UEA)
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is among the top 1% of universities globally (Times Higher Education World Rankings 2014-15) and placed 10th in the UK for the quality of its research output (Research Excellence Framework 2014). Also known for its outstanding student experience, it has achieved a Top 10 rating in the National Student Survey every year since the survey began. UEA is a leading member of the Norwich Research Park - one of Europe’s largest concentrations of researchers in the fields of environment, health and plant science.