A new knee implant comes equipped with its own camera and Bluetooth to broadcast live infection updates from inside a patient's leg.
After a joint replacement becomes infected, patients usually receive a temporary spacer while they wait for a second surgery. This smart spacer transforms that passive piece of plastic into a high-tech diagnostic hub that monitors the joint in real-time. It removes the need for doctors to rely on painful biopsies or subjective clinical signs to see if an infection is clearing. By transmitting data directly to a smartphone, it allows for a precise and personalized timeline for recovery. This device turns a standard medical complication into a data-driven process that ensures a final implant is placed only when it is perfectly safe.
SmartSpacer: Design, Implementation, and In-Vitro Validation of a Multimodal Sensorized Knee Spacer for Continuous Infection Monitoring in Two-Stage Revision Arthroplasty
bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.04.24.720557
Periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) is the leading cause of failure in two-stage revision total knee arthroplasty (TKA). The timing of reimplantation currently relies on subjective clinical assessment, as no established method enables continuous, objective, local monitoring of infection dynamics during the spacer interval. We present the SmartSpacer, a sensorized antibiotic-loaded PMMA knee spacer integrating a miniaturized PCB within the tibial component (65 x 45 x 12 mm). The system incorpora