Dyslexia affects over 15 million children in China. But fewer than 5% are actually diagnosed. As a result, most kids do not get the help they need at a key time in their learning development.

Dyslexia is hard to detect.To make matters worse, Chinese parents are too embarrassed to take their kids to a test centre.

So we took the test to them by hacking a game they already play.

IDEA: Samsung presents Quest for Dyslexia—the hacked gaming quests that help detect signs of dyslexia.

HOW: Working with one of the country’s biggest game developers, we hacked ‘Young Warrior’—the biggest adventure game of the year and China’s equivalent to ‘World of Warcraft’. Dyslexics have difficulty recognising the shapes of Chinese characters and often confuse words of a similar shape.

Using over 100 of these commonly-mistaken words, we redesigned the gaming quests and let kids play the game, just as they normally would.

The quests are a key feature in the game.

This is where a child with dyslexia might find it difficult to visualise the characters.

– so ‘water’ (?) might be misread as ‘wood’ (?) – ‘left’ (?) might be misread as ‘right’ (?) – and ‘bright’ (?) might be misread as ‘dark’ (?) Failure to grasp these could be a key indicator.

Using machine learning to track the players’ actions, gamers who consistently misread the quests were identified as potentially having dyslexia.

Notifications were then sent to the parents, prompting them to seek further diagnosis.

RESULTS: The hacked game acted as an early detection tool. Over one million tests were conducted in the first month. Nearly 25,000 potential cases of dyslexia were identified. Best of all, parents could test their kids—just by letting them play the game.