Kinarm | Interactive Robotics Brain Injury Research

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Anne Vivian-Scott

Junior Software Developer

Posted on Jul 6, 2021

Kinarm is seeking an energetic junior software developer to join our stellar team. 

Kinarm’s interactive robotics are changing the way researchers study the brain, and our understanding of brain injury and disease.  Our one-of-a-kind products are designed, manufactured and shipped around the world – all from our headquarters located in historic Kingston, Ontario.  We are looking for someone who loves to work as part of a small, wickedly talented team and who is willing to attack any challenge.

 The Role

The self-motivated and organized candidate will be an essential member of our team, involved in every aspect of the development process. Working in compliance of IEC 62304, you will be responsible for implementation, and debugging on all of our software products. Our products cover a broad range of applications, including:

  • Hardware control: real-time control of Kinarm™ robots and other advanced technology during experimental tasks;
  • Data acquisition: definition of experimental tasks and protocols, and collection of data in lab and clinical settings;
  • Data analysis: creation of automated analyses for our Kinarm Standard Tests product suite requiring sophisticated analytical methods and attention to detail.

This is a unique position that blends technical responsibility, growth potential, and the opportunity to facilitate the translation of cutting-edge brain research to advance the care of persons suffering brain injury and disease.

Required Experience:

  • Software development with Java, Python, C/C++ or other mainstream language – 3+ years

Experience Assets:

A portfolio of experience demonstrating:

  • Proven ability to define and deliver quality results at each stage of the development process.
  • High level of imaginative problem solving, troubleshooting and debugging ability.
  • High level of curiosity, creativity, tenacity, and thoughtfulness.
  • Ability to follow and provide instructions as both a team member and individual.
  • Ability to learn quickly and be comfortable when something is unfamiliar or things become uncertain.
  • Strong initiative and communication skills.
  • Experience with MATLAB, real-time software development, statistics, and/or robotics an asset, but not required.
  • Experience in software development for medical devices and an understanding of medical device compliance landscape an asset, but not required.

 

Required Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree from four-year college or university in Computer Science or Engineering.

 

Job Type: Full-time

Job Location: Kingston, ON

Start Date: Immediate

Apply via our post in Indeed.  Applicants will be considered as soon as received.  Salary and benefits will be commensurate with experience.

Kinarm is committed to employment equity, welcomes diversity in the workplace and encourages applications from people with disabilities. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Advisory re bug in NI-6229 Block of TDK 3.9

Posted on Jun 18, 2021

Advisory posted 18-Jun-21, re bug in the NI-6229 block

  • The bug affects those sending out digital out pulses only AND running MATLAB R2019b
  • Analog output is not affected.
  • This bug will be fixed with 3.9.1 expected early July 2021.
  • The workaround is to unlink the Sync TTL block, copy the BKIN 6229 DO block inside it and use that instead.
  • Please contact support@kinarm.com if you need help with the workaround.

Ref: CC-1205

Kinarm End-Point Lab (PN 14332) Released

Posted on May 1, 2021

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest model of Kinarm End-Point Lab, PN 14332.

This updated design includes many “under-the-hood” enhancements that preserve the ‘feel’ and function of the old Kinarm End-Point robot (PN 10288, first released in 2010) while bringing the overall electronics design up to current day standards.

To an experienced user, you may find it difficult to find the differences!

Read More

Stephen Scott spoke at KITE, UHN, June 28, 2020

Posted on Apr 8, 2021

Can robotic technology bring neurological assessment into the 21st century?
Stephen H. Scott
Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Dept. of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada

Location: KITE, University Health Network, Toronto

Read More

Kinarm Camp 2021: Registration is closed

Posted on Apr 7, 2021

Our 8th annual Kinarm Camp, will be held Monday, May 17 – Friday, May 21, 2021 ‘virtually’ from ~ 10 am EDT to 4 pm EDT

The objective of the Camp is to provide focused training on Custom Task development for Kinarm Labs. The five-day agenda is tailored to Basic Researchers and will provide hands-on learning on the use of MATLAB Simulink and Stateflow to develop Custom Task Programs for the Kinarm Lab. New users, graduate students, and post docs are all invited to attend. Clinical researchers with an interest in Custom Task development are also welcome to attend.

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3.9 Released: Dexterit-E & Dexterit-E Explorer are Now Available

Posted on Apr 5, 2021

Kinarm is pleased to simultaneously release:
  • Dexterit-E™ 3.9.0; and
  • Dexterit-E Explorer™  3.9.0
Some of the more noteworthy changes in Dexterit-E 3.9.0 include:
  • New Kinarm Standard Tests
    • Arm Movement Matching – the purpose of this test is to assess the ability of a subject to perceive motion of their arm in the horizontal workspace.
    • Arm Posture Perturbation –  the purpose of this test is to assess the ability of a subject to respond to unexpected disturbances of the arm when maintaining their hand at a spatial goal. (Exo only.)
  • MATLAB 2019b support
  • Input files for Task Programs – it is now possible to pass a user-generated file from the Dexterit-E Computer to the Robot Computer which can then be used in your Task Program. (This feature requires a Robot Computer with PN 13107 or higher.)
  • See the release notes for Dexterit-E and Dexterit-E Explorer for a full list of new features.

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Events Calendar

Posted on Aug 11, 2020

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
Neuroscience 2021 (SfN Annual Meeting) November 13-16, 2021 Chicago, IL #1656
Brainbox Initiative Annual Conference September 21-24, 2021 Virtual #TBD
Neural Control of Movement  April 25 – 29, 2022  Dubrovnik, Croatia #TBD
       
       

 

Win10 Compliance

Posted on Feb 5, 2020

Advisory Notices:

Do NOT upgrade your Dexterit-E/GUI Computer to Windows 10 without our Upgrade Kit!

As the Dexterit-E computer is customized to run your Kinarm Lab, the Windows operating system cannot be upgraded to Windows 10 without adversely affecting your Kinarm Lab. Dexterit-E will NOT work.

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Dex 3.8 & Dex-Ex 1.5 Released!

Posted on Jan 1, 2020

Dexterit-E 3.8.0

Jan 2020

The Dexterit-E 3.8.0 release brings many improvements for usability and task development. We are thrilled to be able to deliver the long list of tangible improvements, both big and small, that this release offers. For a complete listing of changes please see the tables below. Some enhancements of special note are:

Study Sessions

Study Protocols were introduced in Dexterit-E 3.7 in order to add task ordering and provide a user interface for performing studies. In Dexterit-E 3.8 we have extended this functionality with the concept of Study Sessions. Within a Study Protocol, you can now define one or more Study Sessions, which allow a subject to be assessed multiple times at pre-defined points during the same Study, e.g. 60 days post intervention, 90 days post intervention.

When Study Sessions are used with KST, the upcoming release of Dexterit-E Explorer will be able to create session and longitudinal reports based on those sessions. These new report types allow you to see Task Scores for Kinarm Standard Tests that were run as part of a Study. Please see the Dexterit-E Explorer documentation for further details.

Enhanced Video Instructions

The capabilities for video instructions have been extended in this release of Dexterit-E. Audio is now supported, such that videos can now include pre-recorded verbal instructions. In addition, Dexterit-E  now supports a wider selection of video formats and CODECs for these instructions (AVI, MOV, MP4), allowing users to create video instructions from a wide selection of video editing software.

Editing Task Protocols

When editing Task Protocols it is now possible to tell which Trial Protocols, targets and loads are going to be used. Each table will automatically highlight those rows that are identified as ones which will be run, based on the contents of the Block Table and TP Table.

Execution Order of Trials

There are two new ways to manage and control the ordering of trials when a task is run: one enhancement is with the Block Table, and one is available through custom task programming.

Block Table enhancement: when editing a Task Protocol, the Block Table has been enhanced to allow nested lists of Trial Protocols which must remain contiguous after randomization. Furthermore, these contiguous lists can be specified to either be non-randomized or internally randomized. The following table contains two examples:

TP List Possible Randomized result
1-5, [10,11,12] 4, 2, 11, 10, 12, 1, 5, 3

(bracketed items are kept together, but randomized internally)
1-5, (10,11,12) 4, 2, 10, 11, 12, 1, 5, 3

(bracketed items are together and not randomized)

 

Custom Task Programming enhancement: there is now the possibility to determine trial order at runtime. When programming a Custom Task, there is a new optional input on the GUI Control block that allows a task programmer to specify the next Trial Protocol to run. In this way you can calculate dynamically at runtime the trial ordering for your task. This feature completely ignores the Block Table within a Task Protocol

Integrating Kinarm Standard Tests with External Equipment

All Kinarm Standard Tasks have been updated to output digital TTL pulses on the standard National Instruments PCI-6229 that is purchased with many Kinarm Labs. These pulses provide timing and trial information to enable synchronization with external equipment.

Normative Modeling Updates – Elbow Stretch Inter-limb Z-scores

As part of our ongoing work to improve the accuracy of the normative models for KST, the algorithm to fit models to the normative data was updated to use weighted least-squares regression. This change was made to account for the heteroscedasticity in the data. While most normative models had negligible changes following this change, the inter-limb Z-scores of Elbow Stretch for female subjects collected using the Kinarm Exoskeleton, had very large changes; these data should be re-analyzed. See the Dexterit-E User Guide or KST Summary for more details.

Deprecation Notices

MATLAB: Dexterit-E 3.8 will be the last version of Dexterit-E to support MATLAB 2013a.

Windows® OS: Dexterit-E 3.8 does not support Windows XP.

Robot Computer: Dexterit-E 3.8 will be the last version of Dexterit-E that supports Robot computer part number 10884. These Robot computers were last shipped in early 2011. If you are unsure of your Robot computer’s part number please contact Kinarm Support (support@kinarm.com).

Upgrade Considerations

If you are planning to upgrade to Dexterit-E 3.8.0, please keep the following in mind:

  • If you are upgrading from a version before Dexterit-E 3.7, please view the appropriate release notes sections for those versions.
  • Your custom task programs will need to be recompiled with the latest Task Development Kit.
    • When upgrading from Dexterit-E 3.7 and using MATLAB R2013a or R2015aSP1 There should be no extra steps required beyond recompiling.
    • For instructions on upgrading from older versions of Dexterit-E or MATLAB please see the Creating Task Programs for Dexterit-E guide.
  • If you have made use of Study Protocols then your Study Protocols masks will automatically be pulled forward to Dexterit-E 3.8 the first time you run Dexterit-E. Once this update is complete we would encourage you to edit your study protocols to add study sessions as appropriate.

ADD DEX-EX

Dexterit-E Explorer 1.5.0

November 2019

Dexterit-E Explorer 1.5.0 has several important enhancements in order to help it align with new features in Dexterit-E 3.8.0.  As well, this release contains upgrades for the usability and flexibility of Dexterit-E Explorer.

MATLAB Integration

Dexterit-E Explorer can be used as a tool to initiate analysis of your collected data. MATLAB has long been the tool of choice to take your analysis to the next level. Now, within Dexterit-E Explorer you can push data directly to MATLAB. Newer versions of MATLAB (at least since 2017a) have an “engine” component that allows Dexterit‑E Explorer to instantiate MATLAB and pass data for analysis and plotting. Once you have configured Dexterit‑E Explorer to use a particular version of MATLAB to integrate with, you can right-click on an exam file or the channel graph in order to transfer data to MATLAB.

CSV Exam Export

In recent years several other programming languages have become popular for data analysis, notably Python and R. Rather than try to build Kinarm Analysis Scripts for every possible language we have added the ability to output the kinematics and parameters of an exam file in a commonly readable format – Comma Separated Values (CSV). CSV is a text based format that any programming language can interpret. Kinarm Support will be providing example code for reading the CSV files that Dexterit-E Explorer will create.

Dexterit-E Explorer gives you the ability to right-click on a single exam file to export in CSV format, or to perform a bulk export of many exams to CSV.

Channel Graph Updates

This release of Dexterit-E Explorer contains several additions to the channel graph to enhance usability, including:

  • Right-clicking on a channel name in the channel list, or on an event name in the event list, will allow you to specify the colour you would like used to draw the channel or event.
  • If you use the mouse to “zoom” into an area on the channel graph, you can use <Ctrl+z> to undo the zoom (i.e., in case you zoomed into the wrong location).
  • If you click on the channel graph you can use the arrow keys to “slide” the zoom window around the graph. Holding down <Alt> while using the arrows will zoom in. Holding <Ctrl> while using the arrows will zoom out.
  • If MATLAB integration is enabled, right-clicking in the channel graph gives you options to move the data in the graph to MATLAB or to plot the data in MATLAB.

Normative Modeling Updates – Elbow Stretch Inter-limb Z-scores

As part of our ongoing work to improve the accuracy of the normative models for KST, the algorithm to fit models to the normative data was updated to use weighted least-squares regression. This change was made to account for the heteroscedasticity in the data. While most normative models had negligible changes following this change, the inter-limb Z-scores of Elbow Stretch for female subjects collected using the Kinarm Exoskeleton, had very large changes. Previously analyzed data should be re-analyzed. See the Dexterit-E User Guide or KST Summary for more details.

ADD LINK TO official release notes.