Almost 800,000 knee replacements are carried out every year in the United States, in accordance to statistics from the Cleveland Clinic.
The restoration, nonetheless, might be lengthy and onerous. But new expertise is serving to sufferers and their surgeons each step of the way in which.
Lisa Herrick, of Arlington, grew to become the primary Texan to get a “smart knee.”
“The smart implant is an implant that communicates with the outside world, just like our smartphones or smartwatches, and even smart coffee mugs these days,” stated Dr. Om Patel, MD Baylor Scott & White in Frisco.
The machine implanted in the knee is from Persona IQ and is the world’s first and solely sensible knee implant granted De Novo standing by the FDA for complete knee substitute surgical procedure.
The implantable Bluetooth-enabled sensor expertise measures vary of movement, step depend, strolling velocity and different gait metrics.
It data and wirelessly transmits a variety of knowledge to a affected person’s private base station at house and the affected person can pull up the information on a smartphone app.
The knowledge is then securely delivered to a HIPAA-compliant cloud-based platform and might be accessed by the affected person and the surgeon.
“The surgeon has full capability of watching the patient to ensure that there’s nothing happening in the background that we’re missing. If so, then we will get red flags or alerts that maybe this person needs a little bit of extra attention, maybe something is going wrong that we can check into,” stated Patel.
This form of Bluetooth expertise is not new.
There are Bluetooth-enabled pacemakers, hip replacements and spinal stimulators, however to be the primary in Texas to get a “smart knee” feels fairly good, in accordance to Herrick.