*Update* Dexterit-E and Dexterit-E Explorer 3.9.3 released.
Dexterit-E & Dexterit-E Explorer 3.9.3 contains important bug fixes and usability enhancements. . This is considered a mandatory update.
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.
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:
Learn more about the Arm Movement Matching task from its developers
Kinarm’s President and CEO Anne Vivian-Scott sat down with Dr. Sean Dukelow and Dr. Jennifer Semrau, the developers of the Arm Movement Matching (‘Kines’) task to discuss its utility in understanding kinesthesia.
Kinarm Labs Now Available to Brainbox Clients
Kinarm welcomes Brainbox as a value-added reseller of Kinarm Labs, bridging Kinarm Labs’ strength in the quantitative assessment of brain injury into the rapidly advancing field of neurostimulation.
Kinarm End-Point Lab (PN 14332) Released
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!
Stephen Scott spoke at KITE, UHN, June 28, 2020
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
Win10 Compliance
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.
Dex 3.8 & Dex-Ex 1.5 Released!
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.