To be successful the game needed to be addictive and entertaining. We had to ensure that the science and the gaming were seamlessly integrated. Navigation was the answer. Navigational skills are one of the first cognitive functions dementia sufferers lose, and a popular gaming genre.

The idea was to create the first mobile game that would challenge and record navigational skills of players around the world, and in doing so create a human benchmark for spatial navigation, against which dementia could be measured in the future. However, a game is only as good as the story it tells.

We created a backstory about a father & son where you are retracing the Sea Hero father’s adventures by navigating your boat through five different themed areas. This simple but powerful tale of a son trying to save his father’s memories is the metaphor for what people are doing by playing the game.

So began a 12-month labour of love. Deutsche Telekom pulled together researchers and gaming experts to create a game big enough to make a dent in dementia. A true collaboration and saw a telecom brand learn about medical research and University College London neuroscientists and Alzheimer’s Research learn about gaming.

Our challenge was to perfectly balance engagement and scientific utility, to capture the same quality of navigational data that’s achieved in a clinical trial, but hidden within an addictive mobile game. In doing so we would create the world’s largest open-source benchmark for human navigation.

For all the work that went into the game, it would have all been for nothing if we didn’t get it onto people’s phones.

Over the next 2 years, a UCL team will be analysing the data, ensuring it provides maximum use to the global scientific community.

In less than 5 days following global launch, primarily driven by PR, the game was downloaded over 500,000 times, and picked up by over 250 media outlets worldwide. We were in the Top 20 in App Store and Google Play across 40 markets, and #1 free game in the majority of them. We then used media and an influencer partnership with PewDiePie, reaching 3.2 million views in 24 hours.

After playing a combined total of 58 months, players generated the equivalent of 725 years of similar, lab-based research – a rate of 150 times faster. The largest previous study into dementia reached only 599 participants. A seismic shift that entirely depended on the innovation and advancement of the smartphone technology that we have in our pockets.

Averaging 5 stars across both app stores with 25,000 ratings, the response has been overwhelming.

Deutsche Telekom released a mobile game that would drastically change how researchers fight dementia, but it would have all been for nothing without getting people to download and play it. To get people to do what we hoped for, we hid the response mechanism inside something that they wanted. This game drastically changed the way that people participate in clinical trials, and exponentially increased the response rate from hundreds of people taking contact slips from a poster in the doctor’s office to millions of people around the world contributing to the first global benchmark of human navigation.

Traditional dementia research was limited by access to participants. At most a study would be able to attract a couple of hundred participants and as a result the comprehension of the brain was always incomplete.

Our approach was to revolutionize the way research data was collected by getting people to volunteer information and time. The insight that people on average spend 3 billion hours a week playing games, increasingly on mobile platforms, meant that a mobile game was the natural solution to our problem.

We had 2 key audiences. Emotional Philanthropists are in search of ways to get involved in the issues they care about, to feel like they’re making a difference. The game, for them, needed to show that the impact they’re having on dementia is tangible and easy to share. The Casual Gamers, are looking for entertainment, something they can play for 2 minutes while waiting for the train.

Deutsche Telekom’s fundamental belief is that “Life is for sharing.” To us, memories and the people we share them with are what really matter in life. This belief is at the heart of everything we do.

Dementia is the single biggest threat to this belief. It is the next global health crisis; currently affecting 47.5 million people worldwide and that number is set to almost triple by 2050. It destroys memories, and not one person has ever survived. However, despite the size of the problem, for every 6 research scientists looking into cancer there is only 1 researching dementia.

There is no understanding of where dementia comes from, how to stop it, or even how to detect its earliest signs. To close the knowledge gap we needed huge and varied amounts of data.

It was clear that dementia research was in desperate need of a radical change in thinking.