Deutsche Telekom wanted to push back the advance of dementia, and we knew, from talking to scientists around the world, that the problem was data – or a lack there of. Traditional research gathering is slow, costly and does not provide enough data for full comprehension of the brain, they needed more data than currently existed. Our solution was a clinical trial disguised as chasing sea creatures in a mobile game. Sea Hero Quest revolutionized clinical trials, making them mobile and increasing respondents from hundreds to millions, while recording more data points in hours than was previously collected in years.
Deutsche Telekom’s fundamental belief is that “Life is for sharing.” Memories and the people we share them with are what truly matter. Dementia is the single biggest threat to this belief –destroying those memories. It is the next global health crisis; affecting 47.5 million worldwide and tripling by 2050. Despite the size of the problem, dementia research is generations behind that of Cancer. It was clear that dementia research was in desperate need of a new way of thinking.
Our objective was to dramatically change the way research was done by enticing people to volunteer information and time, rather than traditional costly, time consuming lab-based research. The insight that people spend 3 billion hours a week gaming, increasingly on mobile, lead us to the question, could a mobile game be the way to get the data that researchers need?
Our ambition was simple yet revolutionary: seamlessly integrate science and gaming, so that helping researchers fight dementia became less about clinical trials and more about chasing sea creatures. The biggest obstacle to fighting dementia is that there is no way to make an early diagnosis, but one of the first cognitive functions that dementia sufferers lose is their navigational skill – which is also a popular game genre.
The challenge was to balance user engagement and scientific utility, capturing the equivalent lab-based data, hidden within an addictive mobile game. In doing so we will create the world’s largest benchmark for navigation covering gender, age and location worldwide. This seismic shift in data collection entirely depended on the innovations of the smartphone technology that we have in our pockets.
Our belief, “Life is for sharing.” became a battle-cry asking people to share their time to save the memories of others and #gameforgood; Sea Hero Quest is an evolution of that brand belief.