MaloneyNotes

Ann Maloney, MD talked to us about how they are using Dance Dance Revolution to encourage kids to exercise. Here is a link to her slides. The points I got down were:

• 18% of kids are overweight
• kids being treated with psychiatric drugs gained an average of 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) per week
• DDR has the advantage of being easy to learn but hard to master
• kids (and adults) will work hard to improve their score.

Ann wrote down some notes on things that came up in the class. Here is her list:

• Feed back from a HR (heart rate) monitor
• Feed back based on errors
• Integrate a chat room, challenges to peers and schools
• Monitored chat, volunteers watch kids improve and encourage them
• Classical music, Rap, show tunes (a challenging research problem see below)
• Health images, Olympics, inspiration openers, family photos (instead of scantilly clad females)
• Microsoft assistant type dancer who pops up and shows features
• Interactive with step counter
• Dennison to log on? (what is this?)
• Earn time on the Robinson box (a box that controls TV time with a numeric passcode that changes)
• Warm up a few moves
• Virtual personal trainer, feedback with the kid’s name
• Reminders water, motivation
• Nutrition quiz, 5–2-1 messages

I have pyDance working in my office. It was a simple hack to make it work with my pad and adapter. I believe it would be easy to customize, or, at least, it will be instructive in a redesign.

On the problem is DDR to arbitrary music mentioned above. I had this illusion that DDR engines had some sophisticated means for synchronizing the steps with the music. Hah! They have 2 parameters called BPM (beats per minute) and gap. These are simply slope and intercept. In other words the music has to have a dead-steady beat or the steps will drift. That explains the preference for Techno style music.

I found a web site and paper on automatically generating steps at http://www.monket.net/wiki/dancing-monkeys. A very nice piece of work but he accepted the strict time limitation of existing DDR engines. It will make an interesting signal processing processing problem to generate steps for any music and to adapt the DDR engine to support it. Actually, I’m not sure an engine modification is required; if you can specify arbitrary times for the steps you could set the BPM to anything and generate a step file with free ranging times. This could make a nice project for someone interested in signal processing

gb