Sea Hero Quest – A new frontier for dementia screening
On 5 November, the Mackenzie Institute welcomed Glitchers founder Maxwell Scott-Slade to the School as a guest speaker. Glitchers is an award-winning games studio that collaborates with experts to create meaningful play inspired by ground-breaking science and real-world challenges.
Mr Scott-Slade’s seminar focused on ‘Sea Hero Quest,’ a mobile game that can measure players’ spatial navigation performance, a skill often affected early in dementia. The resulting data from the game’s millions of players worldwide offers dementia researchers valuable insights into how cognitively healthy people navigate, establishing benchmarks from which deviations linked to cognitive decline can be detected. The Gltichers team hopes that their large-scale data collection while ultimately enable earlier dementia diagnosis and improve understanding of how the disease affects spatial awareness.
“This was an inspiring talk by an innovative Scottish gaming company with a social mission focused on dementia diagnosis,” said Mackenzie Institute Co-Director Prof. Peter Donnelly.
Psychology and Neuroscience Head of School Prof. James Ainge looked forward to future collaborative opportunities with Mr Scott-Slade’ team: “This us a very exciting opportunity that brings together innovative app developers with cutting-edge neuroscience research. There is massive potential to use Glitchers’ expertise and St Andrews research to promote health and potentially prevent disease.”