The new frontier in knee replacement has arrived in Colorado
Knee replacement surgery happens about 800,000 times a year in the United States.
"Multiple studies have shown that about 80% of people are very happy with their knee replacement," said Dr. Brian Larkin, an orthopedic surgeon, and Chief Medical Officer with Orthopedic Centers of Colorado.
That leaves 20% of patients who are not happy with their new knee, and Dr. Larkin hopes that the new Persona IQ Smart Knee will give them the tools to help those people.
"The goal is that if we can get a lot of data, hopefully, that will allow some people to improve or we can direct some of our therapies and treatments," he explained.
The smart knee has a battery that's FDA certified to last 10 years, and sensors that are constantly monitoring range of motion, walking speed, stride length, number of steps, and distance walked.
"What we will see going forward is trying to identify patients or conditions that might not be perfect, and then putting all our energy and effort toward that," Larkin told CBS4.
He recently implanted the first smart knee in a Colorado patient. Susan Rymer Gebhardt got the knee, and is currently rehabbing after surgery.
"I just said, 'Sure, I'll advance science,'" Rymer Gebhardt said.
The data collected by the sensors is sent to a hub that sits on her nightstand. She can access it through an app on her phone, and Dr. Larkin can access it through a secure link into a cloud-based system, and then the data is de-identified and sent to the company that makes the knee for further research. Larkin says there is no chance the knee can be hacked.
"There's no intelligence or inputs that are going back to the knee. It's really just an egress of data from the knee," he explained.
"I have the graphs that I can look at that tell me how I'm doing in comparison to last week or this week," Rymer Gebhardt said.
The app also has exercise videos and educational information that are helping her on her road to recovery.
"It's pretty user-friendly. And, I just follow along and do what it says, and I think I'm coming along okay," she told CBS4.
She's glad to help in this new frontier in knee replacement.