Persona IQ (knee implant)

2021: Smart implant announcement for total knee prosthetics

In early September 2021, Zimmer Biomet announced the launch of the Persona IQ smart knee implant, which the manufacturer calls the first of its kind.

Persona IQ is designed for total knee endoprosthetics. This device was named by MD + DI magazine as one of the 10 most anticipated new medical devices to be on the market by the end of 2021.

Zimmer Biomet has partnered with Canary Medical, a medical data firm. Persona IQ combines Zimmer Biomet's Persona knee implant with Canary Medical's implantable shin extension sensor, which measures and determines the range of movement, number of steps, walking speed and other gait indicators. The device will work together with the Zimmer Biomet remote care management platform, as well as with other components of the company's ZBEdge Connected Intelligence Suite.

Persona IQ knee implant

Chairman, President and CEO of Zimmer Biomet, Brian Hanson, said the Persona IQ smart knee implant, being the newest component of ZBEdge, is developing the company's vision to create a seamless connected complex of digital medical and robotic technologies to provide objective data to doctors throughout the surgical process.

Now, with physiological tools supporting remote monitoring technologies and smart implants such as Persona IQ, we can actively monitor patient recovery and rely on the real objective data that is needed to treat the patient, said Peter Skulko, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

After surgical knee implantation, Persona IQ records and wirelessly transmits a wide range of gait data to the patient's personal base station at home. Data is then securely transferred to the cloud platform. Surgeons can assess the progress of postoperative recovery by comparing preoperative mobility scores with postoperative gait scores collected by Persona IQ. Ultimately, Persona IQ data will be easily integrated with postoperative data collected by the ZBEdge Connected Intelligence Suite and analyzed by the Orthopedic Intelligence Platform OrthoIntel to provide surgeons with objective data as a complement.

As the first smart knee implant on the market, potential patients may have questions about the biocompatibility of the sensor in their new knee, as well as whether it needs to be charged. The company noted that the sensor developed by Canary uses the same materials and technologies as implantable heart devices, such as pacemakers. The sensor is powered by a battery with a service life of up to 10 years, so patients will not need to charge the device. In addition, as an implantable technology, data are collected passively and are independent of the patient's daily compliance with the requirements that information be collected by Persona IQ.^[1]

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