Kinarm Labs and Kinarm Standard Tests address one of the most urgent issues in the management of brain injury and disease: the lack of objective assessment. For example, to test visuomotor coordination, the clinician rates the patient’s ability to touch their nose and then the clinician’s finger on a three point scale ( 0, 1 or 2) – a necessarily coarse ordinal score to ensure reliability. Unfortunately, such coarseness makes it difficult to identify subtle changes in sensorimotor function and leads to floor and ceiling effects in the scoring system. These methods lag behind the level of precision and consistency that modern clinical scientists need, and represent a significant barrier to the development of new therapies.

The results produced by Kinarm Labs are objective, quantitative and sensitive to change. Driven by our suite of standardized protocols and analyses called Kinarm Standard Tests, Kinarm Labs are providing clinician scientists around the world with advanced instrumentation to explore a range of issues on brain injuries and disease.

Kinarm Labs allow clinical researchers to:

• Differentiate – Identify subject-specific behavioral measures that uniquely characterize the subject’s neurological deficit
• Select – Identify subjects for research protocols based on their deficit profile
• Target – Design new patient-centered therapies to address the patient-specific impairment of the brain injury or disease
• Measure – Collect objective data on the subject’s response to therapies
• Advance – Translate treatments for brain injury from lab to clinic.

See registered clinical trials involving Kinarm at Clinical Trials.gov

In this section, we profile a selection of clinician scientists who are performing ground-breaking research using the Kinarm.

credit: CSI, Calgary

credit: CNS, Queen’s

credit: Providence Care, SMOL