HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – Almost 800,000 knee replacements are performed every year in the U.S. and that figure increases annually.
The latest technology in this popular procedure helps both doctors and patients track post-surgery progress.
For more than two years, Donna Owens has struggled with pain in her right knee.
“It started out with just achy stuff, and I had some P.T. off and on but it just got progressively worse,” she said.
When Owens reached the point of needing surgery, she was intrigued by a new technology called ‘Persona I.Q.’
Dr. Karim Sabeh, an orthopedic surgeon with Mt. Sinai Medical Center, is the first in South Florida to use the device, also known as a Smart Knee implant, which he says can be beneficial for a select patient population.
“When I meet a patient for the first time and I see that they have an Apple Watch and a smartphone, I ask them about their lifestyle and if they’re more engaged into their lifestyle, they’re more active. If they like to hike and bike and all these things, we know that that patient will probably benefit more from this technology,” Sabeh said.
Overnight, the smart device wirelessly transmits a wide range of data through a secure cloud-based platform.
“It tracks different metrics that we look for that tell us how the patient is recovering from knee replacement, so it has an accelerometer and gyroscope, so it detects patients gait, we call it gait analysis, so how a patient walks, their pattern of walking their steps, their stance (and) the speed at which they walk,” Sabeh said.
For Owens, the Smart Knee implant, with its direct link to her surgeon, was the motivation she needed to stay on track during recovery.
“He is connected to it and connected to me so he’ll say ‘how are you doing?’ We’re getting information, or I’ll say ‘how is the information’ and he says ‘you’re doing great,’ stuff like that, so having that kind of attention to what just happened, which is a major surgery, I think is impressive,” Owens said.
The device can track a patient’s progress over the course of several years, but it does not have a G.P.S., so it cannot detect their location.