But now, let's go back to stage two.

Today, we will talk about how we can save the human brain. Actually, there are 47 million people living with dementia worldwide with a new case discovered every three seconds. And this, of course, is one of our biggest global health care challenges we face today.

And we want to talk about this topic in the next hour to see how we can share ideas and knowledges and innovative technology and big data to help advance research through mobile gameplay. And I would like to introduce you to Emma Barnett from the

BBC for the next talk. Welcome to this panel. Can you hear me OK? We're all good. It's a pleasure to be here. I am Emma. Thank you very much for having me right here in Berlin. And today, we've asked you to join with us.

The hashtag's behind you to talk about Game for Good, which is an initiative launched today here at Republika. It was come up with by Deutsche Telekom. We'll hear more about how it was thought up in the first place in a moment. With the intention of trying to use games for good specifically with health care and specifically today,

we're talking about a game that helps or hopes to help and certainly looks like it will help with research to do with the diagnoses of dementia and how people use a game and how that can help people with their research. It's going to be a really interesting thing to hear more about in the detail of in a moment. So in cooperation with scientific partners,

I'm happy to say many British people have been involved with this. University of College of London, University of East Anglia, Glitches, who we'll be hearing from in a moment, the co-founder of Games Developers, to come together with Deutsche Telekom and, of course, Alzheimer's Research to create this game which is called Sea Hero Quest. And the approach is very, very simple.

It's essentially based on a series of mazes. You'll have the chance, if not already, to have a play with it. And when you play, you are doing something very, very good, which we'll be explained more about in just a moment. But what is Sea Hero Quest about? Let's find out. We have a film, which I'm hoping will go live now.

Or now, to my right. I thought you disappeared. I'm disappearing right now. No one's ever survived dementia. There are no treatments that tackle the disease itself. We need to understand more about the condition.

We need to understand how we can treat this disease. We know that research holds the key. And for the research to be able to take place, we need data which doesn't exist. So scientists' lack of data is slowing down research. We thought that maybe we could look at this problem from a different angle.

One of the first signs of dementia is that people start losing their ability to find their way around. What makes this project really unique is the combination of cutting-edge science combined with a games design company to reach out to hundreds of thousands of people

in an experiment that we couldn't do in a lab. The game is split up into five different themed areas. You're a sea explorer, and you're recovering memories for your father. And you're going on the journey that he went on, and you're doing it in his boat. And as you move around, your position gets relayed back to the scientists, and they can see it like a heat map.

And that data is used to try and understand, on a mass scale, how people are navigating around these different mazes. But actually, all that data, every little movement they make, every choice they make in that game, it's going to help our research. And the more we can find out about how people find their way around, the better we can understand the problems people might get in dementia. It's a total reinvention of the way

this kind of research data is collected, stored, and accessed. It's not just engaging. It's also scientifically valid and above all, secure. If we can get hundreds of thousands of people to share their time and participate, we can answer questions

we could never have dreamed of answering before. By playing this game, they're helping being part of the solution. They're helping us be that little bit nearer to finding those treatments and understanding how we can better diagnose dementia.

I mean, I should also say, I was very interested to do this today because my friend's mom has Alzheimer's, but she got it when she was 55. And I think it's one of those things

that people think of only, often they only think of it as affecting older people, but it can affect people from a much younger age. So diagnosis and early diagnosis is very, very key. Well, could you please put your hands together to join me for now on the stage, the guests for this panel who are going to tell us more about how this came about and how we can all help game for good.

Great. Thank you. So let me just do a very brief introduction. Straight away here, I have Max Scott Slade, who is the game designer of this, co-founder of Glitches,

a game studio in East London, I'm very happy to say. I know where that is. So we also have Wolfgang Kompal-Boltold, who's the idea for the initiative, vice president of international marketing comes for Deutsche Telekom. I have Sara Cornish just here. He's come in from New York. He works for Games for Change as a project director and also done a lot of time in the United Nations

and an interesting project there, which I'm sure we'll hear a bit about from some of your experience. And a man who doesn't really need much introduction, I'm sure you saw him already, he told me in a much bigger hall than this. I should say Dr. Gunter Duke, also known as a wild duck or a wizard. Please put your hands again. Thank you.

Wolfgang, can I start with you? So this idea for the initiative, I should remind you, we have some traveling mics. Tell me how you first came up with this. Well, maybe it would be helpful for you guys

to first understand just a little bit of our brand, Deutsche Telekom, because after all, we do marketing and we try to position our brand in a particular way. And we regard ourselves to be and want to become a brand that is actually the sharing brand.

So life is for sharing. And all that we do is trying to foster that thought. And with the help of our products and services, we enable people to share, to share whatever is relevant to them. And if you just have that thought sink in for one second,

what is it actually what people share? What people share is their memories. And memories is not just stuff that is relating back to 10 years ago or so. It's also a memory that's maybe just one minute old or just what happened outside a couple of seconds before.

And if you then consider that without these memories, there would be no sharing. For us, there seems to be a natural task to step in because we want to safeguard memories of people in order for them to be still able to share these memories. And that's why for us, it was almost a natural task

to embark on that journey and to start an ideation phase on this project, which we call Game For Good. And Game For Good. I mean, this is what when it makes sense why you thought about memories, which then led you to think about Alzheimer's and how people could potentially use games in that way.

But what for you are you trying to send out as a message about this game? What do you want people to know about it before they play it? Well, for us, this is a stage where we wanna engage you guys. Sharing has also a connotation of participation.

And that means that all of you, hopefully after this session, after this panel, start sharing this news about the launch of the good game. And what I would like you to take home is download the game and share as much as you can, contribute two minutes or more of your life

to trying to defeat dementia and try to find a first, yeah, attempt to really tackle this disease. Max, let me bring you in here. So you had the task of designing a game, no small feat, that would potentially lead

to creating a better route for diagnosis, early diagnosis for dementia. How did you go about that? How do you even start thinking about that design? It was a really interesting process for us because usually when we're building games, the objective is to build something which is a fairly addictive experience

that people wanna keep coming back to and playing. The remit of that is usually just the platform that you're on or how many players you've got or the characters you've got involved. But here we have this science data and this navigational data, which is essential. And the way that this affected us designing the game

was huge. It was a restriction to how we were designing the game, but it was also a really big challenge, but super interesting one. And so just so people understand, when they're having a good time playing this game, what are they actually contributing to? In a moment, I'll introduce people far wiser than us

on the science of Alzheimer's, but just in terms of the game, what are they actually achieving? So as you play the game, you are a boat and you are sailing around these kind of mazes in these themed areas. The first theme is the Arctic. And the way that this information gets translated into data is every 500 milliseconds,

it's tagging your location, your orientation, what you see on the screen. And this data is actually really, really helpful for the scientists who helped design the levels with us to try and understand how humans navigate. Okay, so just staying on that point, I'm gonna bring in, I hope he's there,

has he got a microphone near him? Dr. Michael Hornberger, he's a professor of dementia research at the University of East Anglia who worked on this. Hello, have you got a mic? You do have a mic. Could you explain, if you don't mind, about when you're working together, what is this actually gonna feed into in terms of research to help people who may be thinking they're going towards

having dementia or already have it? So what we see very often in the patients in the clinic that people getting lost and what we try to establish with this game is really to see what is normal in terms of navigation. How do normal people navigate? How do normal people get lost? Because we don't know this at the moment.

So we realized that using gaming and crowdsourcing could be a fantastic way of creating, getting a huge database of healthy people navigating from which then we can use for our dementia research to diagnose people better. And is one of the issues that we can't diagnose people earlier?

Yes, part of it is diagnosing earlier but also diagnosing more specifically because a lot of dementia research is based on, diagnosed based on memories and how you retrieve memories but everybody knows your memory gets worse with aging in general. Well, what we see is usually that people getting lost is a much more specific sign for dementia

and particularly Alzheimer's disease. Okay, so this is very linked to how we navigate because one of the earliest ways that Alzheimer's you can see starts to affect somebody is they get lost and they can't find their way home. Okay, do you mind passing the mic along to Sara? Sara, you've had a look at this. You've obviously got experience, a lot of experience in gaming for good.

I know you don't like the word gamification. We discussed this before we came on. Tell me what you make of it and how it kind of feeds into what you're seeing in this area. Sure, so I come from, I'm from New York City and I work at an organization called Games for Change that was founded in 2004 and we're the leading organization that promotes games for social impact and for health.

And so we've sort of seen this emerging sector of games for health and games for scientific research develop over the last decade and Sea Hero Quest falls into that category and is really breaking new ground when it comes to scientists and researchers collaborating with the game design community to create something that can have a real lasting impact

but also be a fun game. And so I have played Sea Hero Quest. I recommend it. It was more fun than I expected because often playing a game where you go in knowing, I did have a little bit of background on the game so I knew that it was about research about dementia and that there was an intersection of big data and gaming

and all of these things. But the game itself is quite fun. It's a runner, kind of runner-type game and you advance through levels and the levels definitely get more challenging. It recalled some, it recalled getting lost, you know, absolutely, when you reach certain levels.

And I think in terms of the way it fits into sort of the canon of games for health, it's both a really good sort of awareness tool. You know, as you're playing and you're experiencing that feeling of maybe disorientation or those first kind of stages of realizing that you kind of lost your way in the maze

that Max was referring to, you start to realize like, oh, maybe this is sort of what it feels like to experience those first signs of dementia. And so I think that the awareness piece of the game is really strong. And then it's also an example of a game that sort of augments a scientific research program. We've seen some examples of like that,

of games like that, such as Foldit, which is a sort of citizen science game that was developed years ago by researchers looking for proteins having to do with HIV and AIDS. And I think this is a great example of a game that supports a research program in a really strong way. And if you didn't know it was a game for good

that it was doing something that contributed to scientific research, would your view of it, do you think, be different? Because you say that you're thinking, oh, this is how you might feel at the beginning of losing your way if you had something like Alzheimer's going on in your brain. I mean, how much of that is now you know that versus just playing it? I think it's a good question.

And I was having a conversation last night with Max and Michael. And we were talking about the importance of a game first being really fun and engaging and compelling players to keep going and keep playing. And so that idea of being challenged and having really fun mechanics, but then the fact that it does have

this kind of higher meaning and you're contributing to this really important cause that most people have a personal connection to, I think we're gonna be able to kind of see multiple audiences come into this game and play it. So people who are already casual gamers would be kind of engaged in the gameplay and then audiences interested in the dementia aspect of it

and the research aspect of it and contributing to that cause as well. Gunther, hello, let me bring you in. When you see something like this come out onto the market, I mean, it's really launched for free, are we at the beginning of this process, would you say, in terms of games being used properly

by the scientific community for health? Where do you think we are with this? It's a brilliant idea. So that's why I'm here in the discussion. Scientifically, the problem is we get a lot of data and you can have some diagnosis.

Maybe you have to revise the game because maybe at some corner, the irregularity of some guys is better understandable than in other places, then you have to rearrange. Maybe you have to recall the game then after some months and next version and you get better,

and then you get a science tool where you have a good diagnosis. Maybe the dream could be to have signs of therapy in the end that you teach people how to navigate and improve the game. This is the second stage. So you can have a lot of work for many years.

So for me, it's not really interested if the game is fun or not. So maybe for you, you are not normal. Maybe you navigate in a different way because you are authentic hardcore players or something.

Maybe you see it differently. It's also not your task to spend two minutes for playing the game. Your task is to tweet the game and find a lot, lot, lot of normal people participating in two minutes. And I think the fun is these two are really proud people

to have a fun game. That's not the problem. It's a duty to spare two minutes for the fun. And do you think people are more comfortable now with the sharing of their data? Because a lot of people have, I mean, obviously it's anonymized.

It's not something in that sense, but people, if you say to them, just play this game, they feel very good about it. But if you start saying to them, we're gonna be doing this and it's gonna be used for this and we're doing that, I mean, do you think we've got a lot more comfortable with that? Okay, it's not a hard thing to just install the game, play a few minutes.

No, but it's a psychology of using different devices to get into research, to get people to do research. Usually if you think, I think of medical research, I think of going into a lab and being present and providing my information in whatever way they want it. But this is a very different relationship that we're starting through data.

Yeah, the whole, in e-health or in medicine, you have a big, big problem. So most of the research is done for some special illnesses. And if you make a doctoral thesis at the university,

at clinical environment, you find in those rare illnesses, maybe five patients or 10. And then they look for five or 10 people, interview them, two are already dead, which is statistically a catastrophe because you cannot say anything about that.

And then you make a doctoral thesis with a statistics of two or 10 people. And this is the reason that most studies have anti-studies. So one study says, yes, sugar makes you dead.

And they say, sugar is fine for you. So, and you have millions of studies made by maybe 10 or 20 patients. And it would be a great, great thing to just have a cloud of all these data worldwide that you can make statistics of maybe 2,000 or 10,000 having a rare illness.

And with the game, this opens the door of many more possibilities. You cannot find against every disease in this surrounding, but this is a good approach for science to go for the goal.

The problem is always with the data, so I worked for IBM. So of course I was the guy who made the big data business. And I always said, people, we save your lives

and please give the data. It's not that we open your inbox for mails or something like that. It's a different way of thinking about that. We have to be a little bit accustomed to giving our health data to the public or to the cloud

because it's really for the good. And the discipline of e-health needs a lot of data. So for instance, most of the diabetes patients will be soon connected to the internet and they will automatically treat it by the internet from the cloud or in your stomach.

And this saves a lot of lives. I think only in Germany, 24,000 people die on direct diabetes every year, 24,000. It's 10 times more than in traffic also. And of course you have to give the data in this case.

Okay, and on that point, Max, you're getting more work to do here. You might have to go back and do a new version of the game, think of different ways of doing it. I mean, some of the criticism around, I mean, admittedly we were talking about this has only been possible recently, that maybe you can game for this kind of good. But some of the things is you have to be really careful,

I'm sure, when you're creating this that you don't drive the user in a certain way. So they have to drive the game. I mean, how difficult is that to design with that kind of psychology? This is kind of what I was talking a little bit about before, touching on at least. You know, we can't use things like coins or in the game to direct players around

because that's having an impact on their navigational thought process. In actual fact, we can't have shadows, we can't have the sea moving in a particular direction. We can't have so many things that you would usually just assume you could do or would make the game look better, we couldn't do.

So with this in mind, we really tried to come up with ways that were sort of like meta game type elements, you know, your three stars, your boat customization, that would allow the game to still be fun and engaging, but still make sure that we were collecting the data because if people stop playing after the first few levels,

what use is the game, you know? We need to get people playing for a long period of time. And for you, what are like, if you've said what you can't do, so then what are like the core ingredients for people who are thinking about, I'd like to code something which was a game for some sort of good? Obviously, this was very specific. But have you got any things that you've learned from doing it now that you could share?

I think that the collaboration with the scientists was super important, having existing medical studies that were out there that had been used by people to understand about human navigation already. These were really helpful. So Hugo Spears had done some navigational research

and built a crude game, his words, not mine, about navigating. And we used some of the thought behind that in the game. Michael was doing these experiments with dementia patients in supermarkets about them pointing back to the original location where they entered the supermarket. There is a version of this in the game.

And these things exist to really validate the data we're creating from the game as well. You know, it's not just a tool that collects navigational data about players. It has real world science in there that validates that data too. So that's what's gone into it. Wolfgang, when it starts coming in, the data,

how is it gonna work in terms of working with researchers, science, I mean, and what's gonna be the involvement of Deutscher in that? Well, let me maybe first correct a potential misinterpretation. Professor Deuk, you mentioned that this is anonymized data.

In fact, it is not. The data is anonymous. So we don't know anything about the gamers as such. What we know is basically some figures about where in those macies they navigate in which fashion. Also where we come into play

as far as data security is concerned is obviously that all of the background, be it service but also transmission, is on secure data networks of Deutsche Telekom. And we do really pay outmost attention to that fact

because we have given ourselves a obligation that in fact there's also something we call digital responsibility. And that is one side of this, yeah? Digital responsibility for us also means,

amongst other aspects, that the data that is being gathered within this game is actually safeguarded and that there's no fraud in whatsoever regard possible with this data. And I think that is essential because we want really people to contribute.

And as I said, please download the game, please share it. And for us we have a chance for the first time to really create the world's first and global benchmark for when actually dementia is starting to allow us to

try to tackle this disease at an earlier stage, as you said, or to try to find medications and figure out which one works and such things. So for us it's a very encompassing project and not just linked to any data question. And for you, how do you see this going forward?

You've launched it today. It's been a year in the creation. What do you see as the next steps? Well, safeguarding sharing as such is nothing that happens overnight and it will stay, if not forever, but for a long time.

But the goal is to gather enough data so that scientists can actually come up with a meaningful analysis. And I think in this movie you saw a very tiny snippet

where there was a heat map shown where you can literally see where navigation is supposed to be normal or where you are deviating from that normal navigational skill. And once that is sufficient, I think the focus from gathering that data is gonna shift

to analyzing that data. And this is something where we hope that on the far end we will be able to even deliver some diagnosis to us. So when you guys go to the doctor or we and maybe have this thought or this suspect

that I don't know because of me not finding my way around here in Berlin and missing up streets that I might already be suffering from dementia. And so it would be lovely if in five or 10 years from now there would be a simple diagnosis tool where I could do a test like I do a test for my eyes

or for my ears indicating, well, you guys should be in a more deeper investigation about this matter. Sorry, let me bring you back in. When you look at kind of the trends across healthcare specifically with what people are doing with games, you mentioned an example there, was it called,

was it Fold, Fold, Folded, Folded. Okay, I need to check that out. And for you, when you look at this stuff do you think it's doing as much as it could yet? I mean, do you have an idea of where the boundaries are at the moment and where they could be? Because I think we're sort of still at the beginning, aren't we? Yeah, that's a great question. It's an exciting place to be definitely. And I think continuing to break new ground

is really important like this project is doing with bringing sort of cross sector partners together on a project like this where you need the experienced researchers, you need the problem that demands solving, you need the good game designers, and then of course you need lots and lots of players. And there are some great examples out there

of games that are sort of operating at that intersection of treating big data as a public good and conducting research or understanding different human behavior. How many of you wear wearable technologies that help kind of measure your daily steps or your fitness or even track what you're eating?

So a few people. So there is a game developed called Zombies Run that some of you wearing those devices might have played and this game was developed to help motivate people to exercise more and it connected with the wearables to kind of take in some of that data

and encourage you to compete with other people wearing those fitness trackers. And it ended up collecting data from millions of people. Over two million players played this game and so behavioral psychologists and scientists were able to understand patterns of exercise and obesity and so an example of a game for health

that also engaged lots and lots of people. And so there's a game called Remission that was developed to do cancer research and for cancer patients to actually play that motivated them to comply with their treatments.

And so it's a first person shooter game where you travel through a sick body. You travel through a sick body and you actually shoot cancer cells. And so in the process of playing this game, patients would learn about their disease and it would sort of motivate them to fight and to take their therapies.

And so we've seen a lot of examples of different types of games in this Games for Health space and I think something that we're very excited about is emerging technologies like biofeedback tools and virtual reality we're hearing a lot about here at Republika and the potential of these tools to help researchers and game designers work together

and develop new approaches to research. And are you seeing it mainly from the private sector or are governments very involved? Now obviously you've had your experience at the United Nations. I know you operated a bit about like a tech startup within that. But do you think it's mainly private sector who are putting the money towards this at the moment? That's another good question.

Thank you, I'm in the business of questions. You're on a roll. And that's something that Games for Change is really advocating for is more funding and investment into this space, especially this intersection of research and design. There is some private sector support. I think that's something about this particular project that is so unique is the partnership between Deutsche Telekom and the researchers

and the game design and glitchers. But we see a lot of work in the independent game design community. Researchers coming together with scientists and designers to create new tools, to use new technologies. There's more and more support coming from the pharmaceutical industry to support new research approaches using games and kind of these novel engagement methods.

But I think for the most part, it's still sort of a bottom-up sector or industry. But we're really pushing for it to be, to get more major players involved, to get more resources being allocated toward this type of research. And are there particular countries that are leading in this space?

Have you noticed a trend in various parts? Yeah, to be, not to toot the horn of the United States, but yeah, New York. You are in Europe, I'm just reminding you. Yes, no. There's some very exciting research coming out of Scandinavia. Finland has a lot of game companies.

And then of course, yeah, the rest of Europe, there's some exciting projects. But I think the gaming industry in the US is enormous. It's over an $80 billion industry. It's bigger than the music and the film industries combined in the States. And I think that influence is sort of driving a lot of the game projects and the funding.

And we're trying to kind of advocate for the gaming industry to put more kind of research into these types of research and funding and support these types of projects. So I think that it's sort of being driven a little bit by the major players.

And then of course, we're seeing in Asia the rise of eSports and kind of these other applications of games. I should say, we'll be giving you an opportunity soon to ask questions. So get thinking of them now and we'll have microphones coming around. Gunter, let me bring you back in. When zooming out away from this game specifically for a moment, with your experience, with your many hats on, whether it's writing

or working for IBM, whatever you've been doing, being a wild duck, as that is the name that you seem to go by as well. Do you think, what do you think about big data and healthcare working together in the sense of have you seen, have we made enough progress with that yet? What's your view on where we're up to?

Of course, many people have problems with giving their data. Then there's a lot of mistrust maybe in lots of industries. So I'm becoming more ill every year because the cap of the value

is maybe of some numbers in myself with cutting down, down, down, and maybe in my age, then 70% have diabetes or something or cholesterine problems. And we fear, of course, kind of pharmaceutical industries

and all kinds of industries selling something. And I'm more interested as a researcher in this game. And this is purely research and we have to know the data. We have to know whom to help

and whom to be afraid of. Of course, this is always the problem with the data. You can do a lot of medicine. I said that all the clinics, they have some rare patients of the rare diseases. And if they would share all the patient data,

then that would be a wealth of research. And by combining these knowledge by games, this is one possibility to do that. And in this case, I would say everyone donates instead of blood, two minutes gaming, and that's okay.

So I don't see- Some people would have a real problem with that. No, seriously, some people would have a real problem with that. Blood feels like something you're giving that's real. People haven't necessarily made the jump to, if I play a game, I'm helping scientific research. Well, what do you think can be done to communicate that better?

Maybe you have to maybe initiate a campaign which is a higher level. So this is a valid lighthouse project that in some case you can see that research can help. And maybe you have in the end ideas for a therapy,

not only a diagnosis, that you can teach people to behave better. So it's not a real value that I know. Maybe I get a dementia in 10 years and by playing the game, you tell me in 10 years I will have dementia

and I do not love the diagnosis at this time. So it doesn't help me. So you should have also a therapy in the end. And I think this is a lighthouse project

in a much more bigger framework. But that would imply, sorry, just to bring you back in, that we need governments though, don't we, to communicate at this level. No, the problem is in participation. So if you have such a lighthouse project,

you have the problem to get 100,000 people giving the data, say, so this is the request. So we are here maybe 200 or 300, this is not enough. If you tweet it, then maybe we get two or 3,000. We are still left with 97,000.

And we should have the goal, say, from this 100,000, we donate 20,000 in Germany, say, and the rest in the US or somewhere else where you are traveling around. And always we have this problem of participation, participation, participation. And there should be a kind of government help

to promote these things and say, please do that. And meanwhile, we have three billion people playing casual games around the world. And so I think that's such a key to this project is if the game is engaging and fun and compelling, people will play it.

And they don't necessarily need to, the public doesn't necessarily need to see a really impactful research report come out of it yet. And I think to have 100,000 people, the goal of this project initially, to start playing it, we start to see results, and then the science will become clear.

The ideal would be that the game is so fine that you get millions of users just because it's so much fun. It will spread. Yeah, of course, the real Dota 2 or these games, there are full companies behind that and many millions of dollars or billion even.

And there's a whole industry behind just only this one game with all the esports surrounding the tournaments and the public viewing events and so on, so on, so on. And you cannot, we cannot really expect that

if you start a game for research, then it's so much fun that immediately millions of people. Max might have something to say about that in a moment on that lesson, but Wolfgang first. So in some sense, we have to start. Yeah. So hope that it's enough fun

that many people voluntary goes into that. And then of course you have to say, please donate. Yeah. Can I just let you as a good citizen? Let me bring in Wolfgang. Sorry, go on. Just a little bit of perspective because I really love what you're saying, Günter. The game is gonna be available in 17 languages.

Amongst those, there will be even Mandarin and it's gonna be heavily pushed via Apple and via Google on their own behalf. So we didn't do anything about it. They just love it. And basically everybody we speak to

and everybody who we show this game loves it. So that's not saying, please don't do anything. In fact, you should do all you can to help us push this initiative. But we are very positive about the prospects and some of you might've been

at the press conference earlier on. So the first initial target would be 100,000 people who contribute two minutes of their life to this initiative. But I hope it's gonna be easily above this. Well, just before I open out to questions, Max, can I bring you back? It is quite difficult, isn't it, to get people to,

if you say to somebody down the pub who's not to do with the tech world, oh, I'm just creating a game that might be helping with the diagnosis of Alzheimer's earlier. I mean, there's sort of the gap, isn't there, between what you do and then regular people understanding the impact that those games can have. What do you think we can do about that besides government campaigns and making it fun?

I think it's really important to remember that something like Alzheimer's and dementia and these kind of real kind of heavy conditions that people experience, that actually so many people have someone they know that has this problem. And I think people do want to engage with that.

I think that the casual guy down the pub will get sensitive about a family member who's suffering from this problem. And they won't know what to do because in these scenarios, what can you do except watch someone deteriorate or try and make their life more comfortable. So I think people do want to do something,

but they don't know how to. And I think games are a really good tool for enabling people to do something about it. And are you going to do more of this now? Yeah, I really want to do more of this. Is this like a new Game for Good chapter of your career? Absolutely, yeah, for sure. I'd love to be more involved in this type of work

because it's really rewarding. And also, as Sarah was saying, this is such an interesting place to be. We're at the forefront of something very new and it's nice to be in the luxurious position of feeling like you're contributing to the rules that are being written about how to do these kinds of things. And this seems like a successful project

we've gone through and worked with a number of scientists, specialists from all around the world. And I think unanimously, everyone was very positive about the project and it wasn't always easy, but it was a very enjoyable experience overall. Yes, better to be saving people than just collecting coins, I suppose. Okay, well, there's nothing wrong with collecting coins.

Do we have some microphones or a microphone that can go around the audience? Yes, I hope we do. We do? Okay, and do we have a question? Because that would also be useful. We have a few questions. Great stuff. So, microphone here. If you could just say what you do or where you're from, that'd be lovely before your question.

Yeah, I'm Johannes Lauterbach. First of all, great panel, great initiative. I wish you all the success. I'm participating in a cancer study and there I have a direct incentive that I'm accompanied over years

and get feedback also on my risk level in getting that. And I'm just asking myself, what is the incentive playing this game other than having fun? Is there a possibility also to use the channel up to your cloud, up to generating data in both directions

so that I get some kind of feedback, some kind of a guidance for myself? That's interesting. Is that a possibility, Matt? So, the game currently has a time of how much you've contributed towards the mental research. There is an ongoing counter in the game

so you can actually see your impact. At this stage in the project being the launch day, the data that would need to be processed to actually enable us to have some feedback into the app isn't available yet. But I foresee that there will be a loop back to the app itself and that could dictate

the next experiments that happen. I mean, right now we need information, we need data. I don't think that once this game comes out, there's no more information going into the app. Something you should talk about. Maybe just to add, there will be no way for us to be able to link back to you because we don't have your data.

So, I don't know whether this tackles your question, but as we are not able to trace back to you, we will never be able to give you specifically on an individual level any feedback about how you did, for example. So, the benefit for you as an individual is number one,

you're gonna have fun, number one. Number two, you're gonna be in hopefully a good mood contributing to a good cause. Number three, I think that on the long run,

we as a community will be able to deliver aids to help us fight dementia. We don't know how these aids are gonna look like. Talking to the scientists, we are just on this endeavor all together.

We just don't know it. We are trying to get there. And hopefully, as I said earlier, there will be an early diagnosis tool, for example, to be able to tackle earlier and stuff. Let me add, the first 100,000 users are needed to make the tool. So, you have to first to have a study

what the normal being is playing. And then, from the data, you can study what is not normal or has some indication. Then, maybe you have to rearrange the game sometimes because you see at that point, at that point, at that point in the game that you can,

as a scientist, see the most irregular movement. And then, you try to have more of these curves in it where you have more information. And after that, you have even more and more information from the gaming and maybe in version five, you have a real diagnosis tool.

And then, maybe you can think about that people get a feedback after. But in the first run, I would suspect this is just a donation. Okay, thank you for that. Let me, keen to get a few more questions. There's one just here. Please say who you are, where you come from. Hi, I'm Volker Kalle, I'm a physics student.

And maybe you have not told about it, but maybe you know the Open Cognition Project, which has the Luminosity app, and it's very huge. And I think they are doing some things seriously wrong. Even though they are working together with 40 universities

and have over five million downloads, because I think they see this more as a big market. And now, because you're just starting, you have the opportunity to make this different. So for instance, you could make this open source,

everything, as well as using all the data in the open science way, because what I see currently is going on, that you have these apps which are working together with universities, but also the science, let's say the science mechanisms

are not always how it should be. Like for instance, you have big journals, you have publication pressure, you have like some scientists who are doing studies and studies and studies, and like Gunther said, there's actually no research at all.

And well, this could be like the first opportunity to let the community get involved. So for instance, there's so much data out there in all these apps, and I cannot access them.

It's a big shame. I mean, we could do so much more science. So you'd like to know if it could be changed in the way that you have just described to allow people to collaborate more, the open side of it. I get the gist of it. Wolfgang, do you wanna start? I'm not sure whether I got your question right,

but let me try to give you a couple of slices. Number one, let me reassure you, there's no money involved from our side. That was one of the first remarks you made. So Deutsche Telekombe is not trying to earn money on that one. As I said, we would really love to build our brand with this and to safeguard sharing as such, because that is what we wanna do,

and that is what we are. If we, at a later stage, gonna revisit what we do, most likely yes. Are we gonna open it up? I have no idea. Today we start out, we are set out to, again, try to map the global navigational skill of mankind

on a normal basis. Is that somehow a summary, Michael, that you would adhere to as well? This is what we tried to start out with. And I cannot tell you now whether, I don't know, in one or two or three years from now, we're gonna open it up.

It's just not yet clear. Okay, so at the beginning, yeah, could we just have the microphone? Just to comment on that. So all the data will be freely available. All the raw data, we will make freely available to anybody who wants to use it. It won't be, from the university's point of view

and from the scientist's point of view, it's freely available. But to openly develop, it's a problem. The cognitive kind of things, there are a lot, a lot of apps, and a lot of which are looking at translating just psychology experiments from the university to the general public. We moved away from this because we realized

it's very boring for people to do. Instead, we wanted to gamify the whole thing. And this is what we're really trying to do with this, to make it exciting and still scientifically valid. So not that you just do a psychology experiment online. Instead, you're playing a game, and at the same time, you're contributing to science.

Okay, I think I've got time for a couple more. Are there any more questions? Sorry, yes, please. I'm sorry, I can barely speak. I got one question. How much is a budget? The budget's... Well, we don't usually talk about numbers, but to give you an indication,

it's a budget that is reaching into the millions, and it is below 10 million. That much is clear, but it is also a decent chunk of money. I hope this is giving you the indication that we, as Deutsche Telekom, are really serious about the matter.

We wanna make this a success, and that is why we are contributing substantial amounts of budget to it. A decent chunk, there you go. Below 10 million, the millions. Yes, there's a hand to make sure I can see people over there. Please say who you are, thank you.

I'm Christoph Reichardt, and I have a question about have you thought about going to the online publisher, the online game. I think navigating through Mays is just what a lot of online players doing all the day, so why a special app and not using that data? Hello.

Hugo Spears and Michael have used other games in the past and tried to adapt them for scientific use. If you're talking about... These are the scientists, we should say, working on this. These are the scientists who are working on Sea Hero Quest. And there are limitations, and if you're talking from the game perspective itself,

the reason that we had to create something from scratch is because we needed to be in control of every element of what was on screen, and the science data and how that's collected is completely custom, especially because we're operating on mobile phones, so it has to run over a cell connection,

like a data connection, and transfer very, very little data. So from that perspective, that's the reason why the custom game existed. If you're talking about the audience, in terms of there's a huge audience playing Call of Duty, they can download the game on their phones. That's no issue. So I think that should answer the question.

Do you want to start quickly? Maybe the question was can I take a regular game, Angry Birds, which many people before Dementia are playing. Can you use just these data, and by accident you'll find something relevant,

and then you don't have the problem of participation because the game is already established. This is a valid thought, I think. It's a very valid thought or an idea. So, but of course, if you scientifically design

the rules of the game, the science is easier, and getting the data from established games, then science is maybe bad, but the participation is easy. So it's hard to decide. Let me bring Sara in. What about reverse engineering science

into popular games to do good? We're seeing a little bit of that in the learning space and so educators realizing that students are learning through games, through sort of popular games. One example is how many of you play Assassin's Creed or know of Assassin's Creed, a Ubisoft game? Don't be shy. A couple of hands.

There we go. And so Assassin's Creed is based on some different wars, so World War II history and Revolutionary War history, and educators were seeing that their students were acing their history tests and started to ask them what they're doing in their spare time, because they weren't doing their homework, and they were playing a lot of this video game.

And so this company, Ubisoft, a French and Canadian company, has been doing a lot of research around how to integrate assessment and evaluation tools into their game to understand, to kind of build that in. And so in the education space, that's really happening, and I think we'll probably start to see

a little bit more of that in terms of scientific research, but I think it always does come down to how powerful the assessment tools can be and data privacy is always an issue, too. I'll borrow it. Well, sadly, I have to leave it there for the moment, but please go and play the game. We know we need to get the numbers up. The hashtag's there in front of you, Game For Good.

Go and download it, and find out more at cheroquest.com. Thank you very much for being a wonderful audience. Thank you for having us, and thank you to the panel. Thank you.