Toward a Minecraft Mod for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease in Young Adults

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Minecraft-based system for early Alzheimer's detection in young adults, comparing its effectiveness with the Sea Hero Quest system through spatial navigation pattern analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel Minecraft-based approach for early detection of Alzheimer's, demonstrating comparable effectiveness to existing game-based methods.

Findings

Spatial navigation patterns are highly correlated between the two systems.

The Minecraft system shows promise as an effective tool for early detection.

Preliminary results support further development of the Minecraft-based approach.

Abstract

This paper proposes a Minecraft-based system for early detection of Alzheimer's disease in young adults. Early detection, where spatial navigation is a crucial key, is regarded as an important way to prevent the disease. The proposed system is compared with a recent existing and thoroughly studied system using a game called Sea Hero Quest (SHQ), by analyzing spatial navigational patterns of players. Our preliminary results show that spatial navigational patterns in both systems are highly correlated, indicating that the proposed system is likely as effective as the SHQ system for the detection task.