Hawai‘i's first smart knee: the Persona IQ arrives

Hawai‘i joined a short list of places offering the world's first FDA-cleared smart knee implant when Dr. Morton placed a Zimmer Biomet Persona IQ® total knee on October 4, 2022. The operation combined two milestones the practice had already normalized — robotic-assisted precision and same-day outpatient joint replacement — with something genuinely new: an implant that measures its own recovery.

The Persona IQ pairs a proven knee replacement design with sensors sealed inside the tibial stem. From the day of surgery, the implant itself records step count, walking speed, stride length, cadence, and range of motion — no wearable to charge, no diary to keep — and transmits the data to a secure portal the care team reviews. Recovery stops being anecdotal ("I think I'm walking more") and becomes measurable. The full patient guide lives on the Persona IQ page.

Objective remote monitoring lands differently in a state of islands. A patient who flies home to Hilo, Kona, Guam, or beyond after surgery normally recovers out of the surgeon's sight; with a smart knee, Dr. Morton's team watches the recovery curve from Honolulu and intervenes early if the data stalls — a natural fit with the telehealth follow-up model and the fly-in patient program the practice was built around.

The smart knee joined a run of firsts in 2022: Hawai‘i's first robotic total hip replacement and the Big Island's first robotic joint replacement came earlier the same year — the reason local media started calling him The Robot Doc. Curious whether a smart knee fits your case? It's a standard conversation at any knee replacement consultation.