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Kinarm: after 20 years, coming together under one brand

Posted on Jun 27, 2019

To our valued Kinarm Lab users, collaborators and followers,

Today, June 27, 2019 is the day we announce our new company name: Kinarm.

It has been nearly 20 years since the publication of the first paper disclosing the novel instrument invented by Dr. Stephen Scott of Queen’s University at Kingston to enable his own research program.  KINARM, or Kinesiological Instrument for Normal and Altered Reaching Movements, has since spawned hundreds of research articles, not just by Scott LIMB Lab, but also by the more than 95+ Kinarm labs around the world.

Last January, we surveyed many of our current users for your feedback and asked you: what name do you know us by?  The answer was simple and resounding: Kinarm is how we are known.  Thus started a process to rethink our brand and today we announce the first milestone in that process.

As of today, our company is united with our core product under one name: Kinarm.

We are also introducing our new logo!

The Kinarm wordmark takes its inspiration from the common paradigm of our products and the solution they provide to addressing your basic and clinical research questions on the brain.  It is inspired by neurons connecting to each other, and a user holding the Kinarm End-Point handle or arm in the Kinarm Exoskeleton, and reaching their arm to perform tasks.
The uppercase “A” is taken from the original KINARM logo, and creates a precision point representing our core values of precision and scientific rigor. The reaching arm of the “K” could be interpreted as a magnifying glass searching for answers.

Legally, we remain incorporated as BKIN Technologies Ltd., and thus you may notice the BKIN name used in legal statements and financial documents such as invoices.

What doesn’t change is our commitment to you, our customers.  You told us we are: “pushing the boundaries as leaders [with] comprehensive solutions [that are] precise; user-friendly for clinicians, and flexible for researchers.”

Thank-you for your trust; we will continue to deliver just that.

For the entire team at Kinarm,

Anne Vivian-Scott, President & CEO

 

Attending RehabWeek?

Posted on Jan 7, 2019

Customers of BKIN Technologies can receive preferential registration rates for the upcoming RehabWeek conference in Toronto, June 2019.

In order to apply the membership discount, please proceed as follows:

  • Choose that you are a member of IISART during the registration process (https://www.rehabweek.org/registration/)
  • Enter the company-specific code IISART-BKIN-182584
  • When asked which conference you mainly plan to attend, choose INRS. This does not mean you cannot attend other conferences during the RehabWeek, but it helps to allocate resources.

Please feel free to share the code.

World Stroke Congress visitors: please reach out

Posted on Oct 23, 2018

To all of the wonderful people who we met at World Stroke Congress in Montreal,

Please reach out to us if you have not heard from us.  The lead retrieval application has mysteriously “lost” our last 1.5 days of scans.  We are working with them to hopefully recover the data, but for the moment, we are regrettably without your contact information.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Anne Vivian-Scott & Paul St. John

avivianscott@bkintechnologies.com

RehabWeek 2017: Dr. Sean Dukelow speaks about his research with KINARM.

Posted on Jul 24, 2017

 

Dr Sean Dukelow, July 18, 2017 

Long-time KINARM Lab user, Dr. Sean Dukelow, spoke at the International Neurorehabilitation Symposium in London, UK last week.  INRS was one of four conferences that bound together for the biennial installment of RehabWeek.   In his session, he described his research related to identifying and quantifying neurological impairments from stroke, concussion, CP and other disorders.  He spoke of his long-term longitudinal study monitoring outcomes from over 100 subjects with stroke. Over the 6 month period he noted clear differences between early responders, late responders and non-responders. His results highlight the need for more sensitive, targeted identification of sensory and motor deficits to optimize rehabilitation after stroke. Further he has noted that the trajectory of recovery for some individuals with mild to moderate stroke may be much longer than previously considered. underlined the need for better characterization of impairments post stroke (Semrau, et al, 2015).

Semrau, J.A., Herter, T.M., Scott, S.H., Dukelow, S.P.  (2015) Examining Differences in Patterns of Sensory and Motor Recovery After Stroke With Robotics Stroke 2015 Dec; DOI:10.1161/STROKEAHA.115.010750

Dexterit-E 3.6.3 released

Posted on Jul 20, 2017

Dexterit-E 3.6.3
July, 2017

Dexterit-E 3.6.3 has several important updates for usability, stability and maintenance. This is considered a highly recommended update.
Of special note to KINARM Standard Task (KST) users are two changes:
• Ball on Bar task has been updated to allow the operator to command the task to move
the subject’s arms to the starting targets.
• Arm position matching, Ball on Bar, and Spatial Span tasks have all had force limits
imposed in order to avoid motor overheating issues. A review of our normal control data
shows that the force limits chosen should have negligible effect (for Ball on Bar, ~2% of
normal subjects would have been affected for ~2% of the task duration; for Arm
Position Matching, ~4% of normal subjects would have been affected, typically for a
single trial; for Spatial Span 0% of normal subjects would have been affected)

Please see our release notes for a complete list of changes and fixes. Before upgrading, please be sure to read the section on “Considerations for upgrading from Dexterit-E 3.5 to 3.6“.

If you are currently on Dex 3.5 or lower, in order to run Dexterit-E 3.6.3 you will need to contact support@bkintecknologies.com to obtain a new license key.