The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2021–2023
Cheil hid a dyslexia screen inside a mobile game — parents got the diagnosis
A quest game that looks like entertainment quietly tracks misread letter quests, flags likely dyslexia to parents, and won One Show Gold and D&AD Bronze.
Samsung Electronics · Cheil Worldwide
The solution
Childhood dyslexia is cheap to remediate when caught early and costly when missed, yet most children never get screened: parents don't recognize low-literacy warning signs until repeated school failure. Samsung and Cheil realized the one place children were consistently available and motivated was mobile gaming.
Quest for Dyslexia worked inside that existing behavior. The game world presented quest text using letter pairs dyslexic readers systematically confuse — b/d, mirrored shapes, swapped forms — and tracked how carefully each child actually read them. Failed and flubbed reads formed a behavioral signature machine learning could score.
When the signature became convincing, the campaign's design did the delicate part: it avoided labeling or alarming the child and instead alerted parents, recommending a professional dyslexia assessment. The system effectively turned the child's natural play session into a population-wide early-intervention radar.
The mechanism earned the work a One Show Gold and a D&AD Bronze in 2023 — recognition that turning game time into screening time was a genuinely new category of diagnostic delivery.
Why it worked
- Zero behavioral ask: the child plays normally; there is no test to take, so no compliance barrier and no self-consciousness about 'being tested'.
- The clues are diagnostic by design — letter confusion is the actual clinical signal, not a proxy for it, so the game data is real screening data.
- Parents are the right handoff point: they get an actionable nudge toward professional assessment instead of a scary anonymous label.
- Distribution rode the game itself: the more children who play, the more screenings happen, with no per-child screening cost.
What can be applied
When your audience won't present itself for screening, don't build an app to find them — built the screening into something they already do daily, and route the result to the adult responsible.
Aftermath
The One Show Gold and D&AD Bronze runs placed the campaign among the reference cases for 'stealth screening' in healthtech-adjacent advertising, and it is cited in discussions of how consumer products can carry diagnostic functions without medicalizing the experience. The 'game as intake instrument' pattern has since been borrowed by other health-awareness campaigns in Asia.
Sources
- 게임으로 난독증 징후 찾는다…제일기획 캠페인, 북미·유럽서 수상 (Find dyslexia signs through games — Cheil campaign wins in North America and Europe)
- 제일기획, 삼성전자 '난독증 퀘스트' 캠페인으로 북미·유럽 대표 광고제 연이어 수상 (Cheil's Samsung 'Dyslexia Quest' sweeps North American and European ad festivals)
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