We are pleased to announce that registration for our 10th annual Kinarm Camp is now open!
The camp will be held on-line Monday, May 15 – Friday, May 19, 2023 from ~ 10 am to 4 pm EDST.
Product Advisory: Arm Posture Perturbation, Dex 3.9 bug found
Description of the bug
A bug was found in the Arm Posture Perturbation (Dexterit-E Version 3.9) task that allowed a trial without a perturbation to occur under rare conditions. This situation will occur if the subject leaves the target (after the background load has been applied) and does not return for 10 seconds. This behaviour causes the trial to time out. At this point, the next trial will run without background loads. All following trials will run correctly. This erroneous trial would be analyzed incorrectly as if it had background loads.
Correction Plan
The task has been corrected in Dexterit-E 3.10 (to be released Feb-23) so that this situation will not occur. Additionally, the analysis in Dexterit-E 3.10 has been updated to recognize these trials that do not contain loads and properly exclude them from analysis. We strongly recommend reanalyzing all Arm Posture Perturbation data that you have collected once you’ve upgraded to Dexterit-E 3.10.
Impact of the bug
A review of nearly 900 impaired assessments from 195 individuals who were assessed with this task found that about 10% of assessments contained timeouts and therefore would be affected by this issue. Of those affected assessments 70% had 4 or fewer timeouts. At that level we expect the Task Score would increase by 0.5 or less with the updated analysis. The maximum number of timeouts possible is approximately 10. At that number of timeouts we would expect an increase in task score of approximately 2 with the updated analysis.
If you are concerned about the integrity of your analysis, please contact Kinarm support. We can help identify specifically impacted data files.
Events Calendar
We’re back in the swing of things and looking forward to engaging with you at these upcoming meetings!
| Upcoming Meetings | Date | Location | Booth Number |
| KUEL: Gaze-Tracking | February 10, 2022 | On-line | |
| Neural Control of Movement | July 25 – 29, 2022 | Dublin, Ireland | Table #1 |
| Neuroscience 2022 (SfN Annual Meeting) | Nov 13-17, 2022, 9:30-5pm | San Diego, CA | #2631 |
| Society for Brain Mapping & Therapeutics | February 16-19, 2023 | Los Angeles, CA | #TBD |
| Neural Control of Movement 2023 | April 17 – 21, 2023 | Victoria, BC | #TBD |
Neuroscience 2022: November 13-16, 2022, San Diego Convention Centre, Booth #2631
WOW! It really is going to happen: an in-person exhibit hall! We can’t wait to see you again and to provide the opportunity see TWO Kinarm Labs in action. You have to ‘try it to believe it’!
Ian, Paul and Anne are travelling to San Diego to answer your tough questions and give demonstrations of our Kinarm End-Point Lab and Kinarm Exoskeleton Lab.
Send Anne a note if you want to pre-book your visit to avoid a wait!
Exhibit hours: 9:30-5 pm, Sunday through Wednesday
3.9 Released: Dexterit-E & Dexterit-E Explorer are Now Available *Update: Dexterit-E 3.9.4 Released*
Dexterit-E 3.9.4 patch has been released to address a significant MATLAB bug affecting the collection of Gaze data. This bug only affects users of MATLAB 2019b and Dexterit-E 3.9.
Queen’s Cinq à Sept Research Talks: You can’t fix what you can’t see!
With thanks to Queen’s Faculty of Health Sciences for this post.
Dr. Stephen Scott
Professor, Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences (cross appointed to the Department of Medicine)
Incoming Vice Dean Research for Queen’s Health Sciences
Dr. Scott stars in the role of researcher – and inventor – in this exploration of the impact of his robot, Kinarm, which is changing the way we understand the brain. The groundbreaking robot allows researchers to perform clinical testing to assess a broad range of brain functions including motor skills, perception, memory, and decision making.
Trained in systems designs engineering, and with a background in physiology, Dr. Scott has combined two areas of expertise into something incredible. Kinarm is used to assess neurological impairments related to stroke, MS, ALS, Transient Ischemic Attacks, Parkinson’s disease, kidney dialysis, and more.
Dr. Scott holds the GSK Chair in Neuroscience and has won several awards for innovative research. He is widely respected in Canada as a forward thinker and a team researcher, with a huge number of collaborations across disciplines; you’ll see why through his Research Talk.
Watch now »
Technical Bulletin: Kinarm Gaze-Tracker; Impact of Reducing the Number Calibration Targets
Abstract:
The 13-point calibration routine for the Kinarm Gaze-Tracker is slow, and often difficult to achieve a good subject calibration with, often requiring multiple calibration attempts. Two factors contribute to these problems: the large number of target locations used in the calibration routine and the large size of the region over which the calibration is performed. This study quantified the effects on calibration accuracy when each of these factors was reduced. The results show that reducing the number of targets from 13 to 5 has a small impact on calibration accuracy (1.0±0.6° vs 1.1±0.7°) while significantly reducing the total time for the calibration routine. Further, reducing the size of the 5-point calibration region from 100% to 70% had only a marginal increase in uncertainty (1.2±0.9°). It is recommended that for most Kinarm users a 5-point calibration routine will save time without sacrificing the quality of the collected data.
Randomization Bug in Dex 3.8 & 3.9
Please be advised that if you are running a custom task program in 3.8.x or 3.9.x that there is a randomization bug in the Block Table if square brackets are used in the TP List (i.e. TP List in the Block Table = 10-15, [1, 2, 3]) and List Reps or Block Reps are > 1. Round brackets in the TP List are not affected by this issue. If List Reps and Block Reps are 1 then there is no problem.
Any TPs listed inside square brackets will always be randomized to the same order for a given block. The randomized order will be different each time the task is run.
While the bug will be fixed in an upcoming release, we wanted to provide immediate notice to all potential users as the bug is difficult to detect.
To workaround the bug, manually repeat the TP List as many times as required.
If you need to randomize TP List = 5, [1,2,3], List Reps = 2, Block Reps = 2 then instead use:
TP List = [5, [1,2,3]], [5, [1,2,3]], [5, [1,2,3]], [5, [1,2,3]], List Reps = 1, Block Reps = 1
Our thanks to the lab in Calgary who spotted the bug and reported it to us.
Neuroscience 2021: How to connect with us virtually!
Neuroscience is next week, and while we truly wish we could meet you in-person, we hope that you will connect with us through one of these options:
Attend one of our Neuroscience Virtual Networking Events
Impact of COVID 19: recovery phase
Like all businesses around the world, we are feeling the impacts of COVID 19. To keep you abreast of the impact, we’ve started this blog: