Sea Hero Quest: how a new mobile game can help us understand dementia

By understanding how healthy people steer around their environment, scientists hopes to pin down how spatial navigation goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease

If there's one thing that I've learned in the few short years that I've been a fully-fledged scientist, it's that time is one of the most valuable commodities that you can give a researcher. In all its myriad forms, time is invaluable to the scientific process - time to develop ideas, time to write grants. The time that you need to run an experiment. Critically, the time that participants are willing to give you in the pursuit of knowledge. It's a precious thing, for everyone involved.

Like with many things we take for granted, it's easy to forget the importance of time until it's gone. This is a point that becomes acutely salient in the case of Alzheimer's disease. Once a definitive diagnosis has been made, the average life expectancy for patients with the disease is around six years. It robs people of their future, but more than that, Alzheimer's disease robs them of their past - short term memory loss is a common indicator, and as the disease progresses, it can eat into memories from earlier in life.