Location: KITE, University Health Network, Toronto
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.
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:
ADD DEX-EX
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.
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.
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.
This release of Dexterit-E Explorer contains several additions to the channel graph to enhance usability, including:
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.
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:
Please feel free to share the code.
Dean Richard Reznick, head of the Queen’s School of Medicine has just posted his annual report. In it he recognizes the research program and contributions of BKIN’s CSO and co-founder Dr. Stephen Scott. Congrats Steve!
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
July 2018
The Dexterit-E 3.7.0 release brings many improvements for usability, task development, and normative modeling. We are thrilled to be able to deliver such a long list of tangible improvements!
BKIN has successfully renewed their ISO 13485 certification for another three year period. With this re-certification we were also able to transition to the latest 2016 standard – representing the best practice in quality management system implementation for manufacturers of medical devices.
