Deutsche Telekom has launched a mobile game designed to help researchers improve their understanding of spacial navigation, MobiHealthNews is reporting. Called Sea Hero Quest and available on iOS and Android devices, the app was built in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK, a charity, University College London, the University of East Anglia, and game developers Glitchers.

The application will be used to diagnose dementia, helping researchers differentiate when people are getting lost because it’s an early symptom of the disease, or when it is a result of natural aging.

“We knew that there must be a way of empowering everyone to share their time to help to move us one step closer to a breakthrough in the field of dementia,” Deutsche Telekom Chief Brand Officer Hans-Christian Schwingen said in a statement. “At the same time, we realized that if we wanted to achieve real scale and truly make a difference, we needed to make it fun for everyone involved. We needed to create something that would get people gaming for good.”

In the Sea Hero Quest game, users are guided through mazes, including arctic rivers, golden shores, and mystic marshes. Along the way, players should collect their memories in a journal, chase magical creatures, and collect starfish that they can trade in for equipment improvements.

Two minutes of gameplay, according to Deutsche Telekom, represent 5 hours of conventional research; and if 100,000 people play the game for 2 minutes, researchers can generate the equivalent of more than 50 years of a lab-based research.

Naturally, researchers will anonymize all of the data collected and store it within the T-Systems data center in Germany.

Another mobile gaming project designed to tackle dementia was developed by Boston, Massachusetts-based Akili Interactive Labs, which app, Project: Evo, is based on research from UCSF.