Remote patient monitoring has become one of the fastest moving corners of healthcare technology. A decade ago, recovering from surgery meant waiting weeks for a doctor to check on progress, with clinicians relying mostly on what a patient reported and the occasional in person assessment. Today more of that recovery happens at home, tracked by wearable sensors that feed data straight to a clinician's screen, and scattered pilot programmes are turning into standard post operative care across US hospitals.

Knee rehabilitation shows how that shift works in practice, and why it was needed. After a knee replacement or similar procedure, most of the actual recovery happens away from the clinic, in the weeks a patient spends doing prescribed exercises at home. Clinicians traditionally had little visibility into that stretch beyond what the patient remembered to mention at the next appointment, which made it hard to catch poor adherence or a stalled recovery early. Wearable sensors close that gap. A patient wears two small sensors on her leg, one on the femur and one on the tibia, and as she moves through her exercises, the sensors track the angle between them, turning a bend into a Range of Motion measurement a clinician can check, alongside how consistently the exercises are being done.