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 |
| ASNR Annual Meeting | March 13-17, 2023 | Charleston | N/A |
| Neural Control of Movement 2023 | April 17 – 21, 2023 | Victoria, BC | Table #1 |
| World Congress of Neurology | Oct 15-19, 2023 | Montreal, QC | #TBD |
| Neuroscience 2023 (SfN Annual Meeting) | Nov 11-15, 2023, 9:30-5pm | Washington, DC | #TBD |
| AAN 2024 | #TBD |
Instructions for upgrading from 3.9 to 3.10:
WOW! It really is going to happen: an in-person exhibit hall! We can’t wait to see you again and to provide the opportunity see TWO Kinarm Labs in action. You have to ‘try it to believe it’!
Ian, Paul and Anne are travelling to San Diego to answer your tough questions and give demonstrations of our Kinarm End-Point Lab and Kinarm Exoskeleton Lab.
Send Anne a note if you want to pre-book your visit to avoid a wait!
Exhibit hours: 9:30-5 pm, Sunday through Wednesday
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.
If you would like to be added to the wait list, please email: Camp@kinarm.com
As of 24-Feb-23 this bug has been fixed, with the release of Dexterit-E 3.10
Description of the bug
A bug was found in the Arm Posture Perturbation (Dexterit-E Version 3.9) task that allowed a trial without a perturbation to occur under rare conditions. This situation will occur if the subject leaves the target (after the background load has been applied) and does not return for 10 seconds. This behaviour causes the trial to time out. At this point, the next trial will run without background loads. All following trials will run correctly. This erroneous trial would be analyzed incorrectly as if it had background loads.
Correction Plan
The task has been corrected in Dexterit-E 3.10 (to be released Feb-23) so that this situation will not occur. Additionally, the analysis in Dexterit-E 3.10 has been updated to recognize these trials that do not contain loads and properly exclude them from analysis. We strongly recommend reanalyzing all Arm Posture Perturbation data that you have collected once you’ve upgraded to Dexterit-E 3.10.
Impact of the bug
A review of nearly 900 impaired assessments from 195 individuals who were assessed with this task found that about 10% of assessments contained timeouts and therefore would be affected by this issue. Of those affected assessments 70% had 4 or fewer timeouts. At that level we expect the Task Score would increase by 0.5 or less with the updated analysis. The maximum number of timeouts possible is approximately 10. At that number of timeouts we would expect an increase in task score of approximately 2 with the updated analysis.
If you are concerned about the integrity of your analysis, please contact Kinarm support. We can help identify specifically impacted data files.
We are now full for our 9th annual Kinarm Camp, will be held Monday, May 16 – Friday, May 20, 2022 ‘virtually’ from ~ 10 am to 4 pm EDST.
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.
