Mankato- August 2024- For more than 15 years, Ronald Gary Woods ended most days with aching knee.
“It was hard walking around. My knees would get sore and were popping and cracking,” says Woods, 63, of Eagle Lake, Minnesota. “It’s like everything else, they just wore out.”
Woods tried various treatments, including cortisone shots and nerve ablation, to interrupt pain signals sent to the brain. He planned to wait until retirement for surgical intervention. “But I was tired of hurting,” he says.
Woods and Jacob Ziegler, M.D., his orthopaedic surgeon at Mayo Clinic Health System in Mankato, recommended bilateral knee replacement, a surgery to replace both of his knees at the same time. Dr. Ziegler had recently become the first surgeon in the health system to begin utilizing new sensor technology licensed by Zimmer Biomet through a partnership with Canary Medical. The smart orthopaedic implants function just like standard knee replacements, but they include a sensor in the stem anchored in the shin bone that remotely monitors and tracks a patient’s recovery by measuring range of motion, steps, stride and other data associated with gait.
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Dr Ziegler explained to Woods that he would use of an app to see his gait and mobility information as he recovered from surgery. Dr. Ziegler’s team would upload the data daily to monitor Woods’ progress.
“It sounded pretty good,” Woods says. “The doctor said it was for research too. I thought, ‘Why not?'”
According to Zimmer Biomet, Woods was one of the first known patients in the world to receive single-surgery bilateral smart knee replacements on March 26. Dr Ziegler and Cory Couch, M.D., orthopaedic surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, are the only two Mayo Clinic surgeons who have implanted smart knee replacements in patients, but they will become widely available after Mayo Clinic’s trial period of the technology.
