To be successful the game needed to be addictive and entertaining, ensuring 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 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 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. The only game where anyone can help scientists fight dementia.

Deutsche Telekom pulled together researchers and gaming experts creating a game big enough to make a dent in dementia. A true collaboration saw a telecom brand learn about medical research and University College London neuroscientists and Alzheimer’s Research learn about gaming.

Our challenge was 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.

Launched on April 18th in the UK, followed by a global launch in 16 languages, the game featured on Google Play. Over the next 2-years, a UCL team will be analysing the data, providing 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.