All those hours whiled away on mobile games like Candy Crush, Angry Birds and Dumb Ways to Die can be put to better use - curing cancer no less. Cancer Research UK has launched the first mobile app game that uses the power of gamification to help analyse medical data.
Play to Cure: Genes in Space launches this week. It's a free game app that anyone in the world can play on Android or iPhone. It comes as the World Cancer Report released new data showing cancer has overtaken heart disease as the biggest killer in Australia, and predcted a global cancer 'tsunami' over the next 20 years.
The UK charity held a hackathon event last year called GameJam asking app and game developers, scientists and data boffins to come together to create an innovative way to help the research organisation get through the endless reams of tissue sample data it has to speed up the process of analysing.
The game inputs the gene data as code and while guiding a spaceship though a “hazard-strewn intergalactic assault course” collecting points, players are actually spotting anomalies in the data that scientist can then investigate to analyse gene variations and help develop cures and treatments for cancer.
By handing over the data analysis to the masses Cancer Research can speed up the process.
Each data set will be played and scanned by multiple players to ensure accuracy and in testing it was found to be as accurate, if not more so, than, other ways of looking at it.
Hannah Keartland, citizen science lead for Cancer Research UK, said: “Our world-first Smartphone game is simply out of this world. Not only is it great fun to play – but every single second gamers spend directly helps our work to bring forward the day all cancers are cured. Our scientists’ research produces colossal amounts of data, some of which can only be analysed by the human eye – a process which can take years.
“We urge people to give five minutes of their time wherever and whenever they can - whether they’re waiting for their bus to arrive or they’re in the hairdressers having a blow dry. Together, our free moments will help us beat cancer sooner.”
Play on.
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