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 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. New smartphone and touchscreen technology allowed this to happen, for scientists to conduct mobile clinical trials. 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.