If we are to call technology as man’s greatest creation since sliced bread, then we won’t be way off the mark. However, we cannot ignore the fact that it might also be the most controversial thing to come out of our mind. Now, you can argue that with all what it has done since its inception, we should consider technology as a clear cut blessing, but we don’t do that for some justified reasons. To contextualize this statement, we can just look at the market’s atmosphere. The huge influx of tech devices has broadened things up by a great mile in terms of opportunities for general public, which is, of course a good thing, but you can’t talk about technology without some negatives coming into play as well. With so many people vying for similar goals across different industries, the market is left with no option but to head towards saturation. This means profit shares getting thinner and thinner and entities falling to their most vulnerable point, leaving little or no room at all for an error. Nevertheless, one sector where growing competition is seemingly turning into a recipe for success is the one of healthcare. With technology being so widely used within this sphere, the medical equipment manufacturers can only rely on one thing to get an edge, and that is innovation. These manufacturers, in the search of a better stronghold on the market, have been coming up with unique ways to improve our overall well-being. An example of it is quite evident in the rivalry of Zimmer and Stryker.
We got to see a new chapter of the popular Zimmer-Stryker back and forth, as Zimmer’s smart-knee technology; Persona IQ recently got approved by the FDA. Persona IQ, an improved version of Zimmer’s Persona Knee, is developed in collaboration with Canary Medical. A primary reason to do so was being able to rope in Canary’s implantable sensory technology to measure a patient’s range of motion, step count, walking speed, and other metrics. The product comes as a response from Zimmer to Stryker acquiring OrthoSensor, a firm that creates sensors for use in total joint replacement procedures.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the two companies have been locking horns for a long time, both of them strongly agree on the point of orthopedics’ future being in real-time data. Zimmer’s CEO, Bryan Hanson, even spoke at length about how the company has pledged its allegiance to data informatics and robotics by investing over 70% of their innovation resources in these two branches.
Another way through which Persona IQ is trying to repaint the orthopedics picture speaks to the introduction of remote access. This particular discipline has largely operated on making in-person assessments, but by making the device compatible to their remote care management platform, mymobility, Zimmer has bolstered the future prospects of this area.
