William Hunter, MD

Smart medical implants are allowing doctors to monitor post-surgery progress with more real-time data than a single visit can provide. In an age where remote healthcare is improving access to care, new sensor technology is enabling better patient outcomes by monitoring real-time progress. In contrast to wearables, where much of the field has focused, smart medical implants can give a deeper view of biology and more actionable data. This technology is already being used in knee replacements to aid doctors in making informed care decisions during patient recovery and is poised to be incorporated into other medical implants. Canary recently introduced its first orthopedic analytic module, Canary Recovery CurvesTM. Recovery curves utilize movement data measured by Canary Medical’s proprietary implantable canturio™te tibial extension sensor technology integrated into Zimmer Biomet’s Persona IQ®. By pooling patient data, Recovery Curves provide frequent, objective aggregate population data of each patient’s activity levels and knee kinematics and ranks each patient’s knee performance versus their peers based on age group, gender and time since surgery. Clinicians can now access and use this daily functional information to determine whether to augment their in-office patient examinations and/or to update their care plans in the year following surgery. Recovery curves are the world’s first and only monitoring tool available to reproducibly characterize an individual patient’s total knee replacement recovery versus objective aggregate population data obtained from identical implantable sensors.