Technology is constantly changing, and smart devices aren't just something to carry around in the palm of your hand; some people opt to get smart devices implanted inside their bodies.
Doctors told ABC Action News that innovative medical device implants are the future.
SMART KNEE VS DUMB KNEE
"I tell my patients I do smart knees and dumb knees. Which one do you want?" Dr. Steve Lyons, a physician at Florida Orthopedic Institute who performs replacements at AdventHealth, said. "I think what this will ultimately do is transform the science of knee replacement into a more modern era and allow us to improve patient care beyond the realm that we ever thought possible."
The antennae for the smart device sends a radio frequency to a receiver. The data collected allows patients to monitor their recovery in real-time, and doctors can pull it up online, too.
"I can look at the number of steps, distance, cadence, stride length, range of motion, and so forth," Dr. Lyons said. "It's allowing them to get their data whenever they want. I can set little alarms to tell me when I need to interact with patients sooner because they're not achieving their goals."
The smart knee has been a game changer for Dr. Lyons' patient, Raymond Hewitt.
"It was on the golf course—I swung the club, and I felt a twinge and after a little while, it went away, but little by little started getting worse," Hewitt said. "For me, it's a lifesaver. Lets me get around to what I want to do. I'm not running, but I'm able to walk. I'm getting back into my walking."
TOTAL ARTIFICIAL HEARTS
Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women. The race is on to save lives.
"It is an exciting day to be in cardiothoracic surgery. Things are always getting better," Dr. Gundars Katlaps, a heart and lung transplant surgeon at Tampa General Hospital, said.
While implants using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or radio waves are more common in knee replacements and other fields, Dr. Katlaps said his field is building off inventions with FDA approval.
"The breakthroughs in the last ten years have been more developing and understanding what we can do with the current devices and gradual improvements of the devices that we have," Dr. Katlaps said. "Surgeons have chased the perfect artificial heart, different ventricular assist devices, and the risk has been on. There is always another turn, another development to make them sturdier, to make them more durable, lighter, easier to implant, safer."
Dr. Katlaps said artificial intelligence and synthetic biology make him most optimistic about the future of implants.
"We all will live forever, and diseases will be in the rearview mirror, and the future's bright," Dr. Katlaps said. "Total artificial hearts is a real thing. There's always a new device being worked on. And the current devices are pretty good. We had excellent outcomes. Most of our patients survived being transplanted. Now, we need a device that successfully competes with transplantation so that people don't need to wait for a donor's heart. They can get the artificial heart."
Dr. Katlaps believes what we consider science fiction today will be saving lives tomorrow.
"That is some dark magic with people smarter than I am developing," Dr. Katlaps said. "The new humans will be developed in three different ways: changing the genome of our offspring, or cyborgs or biological beings are married with mechanical parts and computers and chips and pieces. If it can save lives, though, and it's safe. That's the most important thing. They come to us broken, and we fix them."
PROTECTING DATA
Bad actors want to take advantage of any advancement in technology.
We Zoomed with Jessica Wilkerson, the Senior Cyber Policy Advisor in the Medical Device Cyber Security Team at the Food and Drug Administration.
"My job revolves entirely around the cybersecurity of medical devices," Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson believes the opportunities are "enormous" when it comes to helping patients.
"These advances in technologies really can help patients, from providing more real-time monitoring of patient information to just these advanced capabilities that may not exist otherwise. But at the same time, any type of connected system, as I was saying before, can be vulnerable," Wilkerson said. "I think right now, the most common struggle we have, or what we're challenged to deal with, is ransomware. Ransomware in hospitals can affect the functionality or availability of medical devices in hospital environments."
She continued, "So, I think the one thing that we would want your viewers to know and you to know is that in many cases, the FDA is able to examine these devices for reasonable assurance of cybersecurity before they can ever touch a patient."
As for the smart knee implanted in Hewitt's leg, we are told it is not at risk of a cyberattack.
"You can't be tracked by this device. It's not Bluetooth, it's not Wi-Fi. It's radio frequency waves that go from the smart IQ stem to the little black box that usually goes under patient's beds that downloads the data every night," Dr. Lyons said.
