Research project

Dear Stepmaniacs,

I'm a surgeon in Switzerland interested in how patients recover after spinal cord injuries. We're just setting out on a project in which we're using Stepmania 5 on an Impact DancePad as a fun task to train the lower limbs of people with spinal cord injuries as well as normal control subjects. We're then going to scan them at regular intervals to see what changes the training causes in their brains and spinal cords. We've used the Dancing Monkeys script to make a load of songs and feedback from our pilot studies have been very positive. I've found some of the Q&As on here very useful but have a specific question I thought some of you might be able to help me with.

We're using the overall percentage score in SM5 as our key metric for assessing progress. Subjects have to get more than 80% in three songs before they can progress to a higher level (faster bpms or increased difficulty level). In addition, I want to know what their individual legs are doing - I'd like to get a percentage score for both the left and right arrows for each song, as this reflects the motor ability of each leg and can be used to track progress in more detail. The up and down arrows should be excluded from this readout as they could be hit by either leg. I'm sure there's a way of recording / accessing this data. Any of you clever programmer types got an idea of how to go about this?

I've cross posted in the FFR forum.

Thanks in advance for your valued input,

Tim

Per-column scoring isn't something that I think would be easy for someone new to stepmania theming to do, but I feel really interested in implementing it for you.
Are you building stepmania from source, or using a binary release?

I just added per-column judgment tracking to my theme yesterday, as it is a useful way to sort out "pad crap" or technique problems. Stepmania provides all of the information you need for each judgment during gameplay, but the column info is not available on ScreenEvaluation so you have to record it yourself during gameplay.

Actually implementing it requires some familiarity with stepmania and lua, but if Kyzentun is helping you you'll be fine.

Hi Kyzentun, Mad Matt,

Thanks for your rapid replies and particularly your kind offer of assistance, Kyzentun! We're just using the binary SM 5 release "out of the box" on Windows 8. We don't need the per column scores to be displayed anywhere, just saved in a log file that we can access.

If you need any more info on our setup let me know!

I'll pm you my email address, Kyzentun.

Best wishes,

Tim

Per-column scoring isn't something that I think would be easy for someone new to stepmania theming to do, but I feel really interested in implementing it for you.
Are you building stepmania from source, or using a binary release?

Doesn't look like I can pm. EMail is [removed by request]