New smartphone game may help fight dementia

Scientists have created a new smartphone game that may help determine how dementia affects the brain and improve approaches to detect the disease early.
Scientists, including those from University College London and the University of East Anglia in the UK developed Sea Hero Quest, a smartphone game that may help to build the largest crowd-sourced database on human spatial navigation.
People with dementia can face real challenges with navigation, and it is a problem that can occur early on in the condition.
Researchers do not have reliable data on how navigational abilities can change in the healthy brain across life.

Playing the game for just a few minutes will provide this completely anonymous data to help improve understanding of navigational cognition, researchers said.
The game could pave the way for improved approaches to early disease detection, in turn helping improve people's chance of benefiting from new or existing treatments earlier, they said.