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Zimmer Biomet seeks a ZBEdge for its Rosa robotic surgery

June 16, 2025 By Chris Newmarker

This is a Zimmer Biomet marketing image of its Rosa robotic surgery system.

Zimmer Biomet’s Rosa robotic surgery system  is a major component of the device developer’s ZBEdge ecosystem. [Image courtesy of ZB]

Competition is stiff in the ortho robotic surgery space, but Zimmer Biomet bets data-driven patient management is the ace up its sleeve.

Shaun Braun spent nearly 13 years at Stryker, where he helped build the digital infrastructure around the Mako robotic systems that took the orthopedic surgery space by storm.

He eventually started a SVP position at soft-tissue surgical robotics company Intuitive, but after a year there, a casual introduction to Zimmer Biomet CEO Ivan Tornos changed everything. Tornos, after all, has goals for Stryker’s competitor ZB to be nothing less than the “boldest medtech company on Earth.” 

Said Braun of his initial meeting with Tornos, “I got a chance to feel the power, the energy, the boldness. He very quickly turned from, ‘Hey, tell me a little bit about your experiences,’ to, ‘I’ve got an experience for you.’”

In May 2024, Braun joined Zimmer Biomet as chief information and digital officer. Six months later, he added chief technology officer to his responsibilities.

“When Ivan crafted this role, it was, ‘Let’s bring it all together and drive enterprise technology with product technology and transform healthcare,’” Braun said. “And that’s the journey we’re on.”

This is a portrait photo of Shaun Braun who is the chief information and technology officer at Zimmer Biomet.

Zimmer Biomet Chief Information and Technology Officer Shaun Braun [Image courtesy of Zimmer Biomet]

Zimmer Biomet has been competing against Stryker’s Mako robots with its own Rosa systems for knee, hip, brain and now shoulder procedures. Braun says ZB has an edge with its ZBEdge dynamic intelligence platform for hip and knee surgeries, which connects and collects data throughout the entire episode of care and serves it up to health providers and patients to inform better outcomes.

ZBEdge includes the company’s MyMobility app for iPhone and Apple Watch to track progress and keep patients connected with their care teams, the Persona IQ smart knee implant created with Canary Medical, and the recently released AI-powered ZBEdge Analytics.

“They have stuck to this journey for six-years-plus, when many other orthopedic companies have stopped the investment,” Braun said of Zimmer Biomet. “It’s about personalized intelligence. That’s what we are really driving. We’re the only company today that can take that preoperative information of the consumer/patient.”

Braun recently discussed ZBEdge, Rosa, and what’s next with Medical Design & Outsourcing. (The comments below have been mildly edited for clarity.)

MDO: What kind of challenges did ZB face with MyMobility?

Braun: “It’s hard to monetize these software solutions. For organizations, rightfully so, there’s [the question of] how are we going to monetize this and who’s going to pay for it? Is the consumer going to pay for it, the patient? Unlikely. Are the providers going to? An ASC, an IDN? Are the payers going to pay for it? Early days, there were a lot of challenges with how are we going to monetize this? There’s shared value, and anytime there’s shared value, there’s kind of pinpointed value, right? We have over 250,000 patients that are running on MyMobility. So Zimmer Biomet has cracked the code on getting individuals to download the application. We still have some work to do on how to monetize it more directly on the value we believe we’re providing. … A lot of orthopedic companies have been challenged with whether to place the robot and then get pulled through from an implant perspective. We believe we’ve got something very unique now with ZBEdge Analytics and MyMobility. We are actually getting approached by third-party groups that have broader wellness platforms or work more specifically with large organizations that have to support their own employees. They are looking to pay us and white-label what we’ve built out, because there’s so much depth. … For us, it is agnostic to implant. Many of our technologies are agnostic to implant. We believe that power, that intelligence layer, needs to preside as such.”

Any updates on your partnership with Canary Medical?

Braun: “Bill [Hunter, Canary’s CEO,] has been doing some incredible work with us looking at patient recoveries and starting to find some unique biomarkers. The economic cost of individuals being nervous about their recovery curve — coming into ERs or asking for an extra scan — there are some early indicators that if someone is actively looking at their data, there’s a reduction of 40% of unneeded return visits. That is a massive number. We’ve got white papers and abstracts that we’re putting in for AAHKS (American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons) this year. I think that’ll be super exciting for orthopedics in general to see.”

How do you handle the interface and communication with healthcare providers, because every doctor I’ve ever met has a really busy schedule?

Screenshots of Zimmer Biomet's ZBEdge Analytics.

ZBEdge Analytics takes data from a array of sources — such as the Rosa robotic surgery applications, MyMobility metrics collected via patient iPhone and Apple Watch, and the Persona IQ smart knee implant — and flows them onto a smartphone application where surgeons can assess patient performance. [Image courtesy of Zimmer Biomet]

Braun: “To your point, I would say the vast majority are, ‘Wow. Is this going to be a burden to me and my care teams?’ Because it’s alert fatigue, right? So the team had to be very thoughtful about the most important information. You can turn off a lot of the noise for certain customers, and you can give other customers the full breadth of the data that they want. Our current model is simple dashboards with color, the notion of, ‘Who do you need to zoom in on?’ These are daily readouts. So if everybody’s great, everybody’s on their recovery curve, within the track of their personalized journey? Nothing. Open up the dashboard? Great. If there are some yellows, reds, you can click. You can see, ‘Odd, they didn’t take that many steps,’ or, ‘They took too many steps. They’re gonna get some swelling because they are trying to get back to the marathon too fast.’ With generative AI and a lot of the large language models, we are already working on the next step. So why do you have to even look at a dashboard? Why do we have to construct dashboards, and everybody looks at data differently? Have a very natural interface in the morning on your drive in. ‘Tell me about my patients. Tell me about Sally or Joe.’ The data is there, the technology is there to enable that for folks who are more comfortable with that level of interaction. That’s going to be the pathway. It’s super exciting, because it’s now.”

Is there a name yet for the voice assistant you’re developing?

Braun: “We need to get the marketing team involved because there are a lot of thoughts around that. You’ve got to be careful with names.”

What kind of results are you seeing with Rosa, and how does it fit into the whole ZBEdge ecosystem?

Braun: “Rosa, historically, has been very data rich to take the procedure that the surgeon was used to and bring a robotic form factor to it that still allows a lot of the depth of detail for those surgeons to drive. That has worked really well for certain surgeons, especially internationally. Incredible results. Inside the U.S., there’s, ‘Simple sometimes is better.’ We have a really exciting launch that’s coming out here at AAHKS [Oct. 23–26, 2025 in Dallas]. We’re calling it internally our Rosa Knee with Optimize. I think it’s going to have an exciting impact, because it takes some elements of the complexity and it really gives surgeons the opportunity to put some of their personalized, intelligent decisions into the platform so the action when you’re in the operating room is much more efficient. For certain surgeons, they are still going to want to see all the dials and gauges when they’re deciding on their alignment philosophies. Others have a certain philosophy in mind, and then they want to roll with it. We’ve seen some competitive platforms go with a pretty simple, ‘Here’s your plan, your scan, and get after it.’ So I think this will be really impactful for some of the surgeon profiles that are looking for a much more simple registration process and decision-making process based on their own personalized inputs.”

Where would you like to improve on Rosa?

Braun: “I think that the bigger area of focus we have is this robustness of data and bringing that personalized intelligence in a very seamless fashion back to the planning and decision-making in a personalized fashion for each of those patients. That’s the part that we’re really excited about with ZBEdge Analytics that gives that post-game film about the decisions you made and results you saw. It starts to get into some recommendations around adjustments they may want to make, obviously leaving the decision-making in the hands of the surgeons and the care teams. But the interesting part now is that alignment philosophy is all the rage: kinematic, mechanical, all kinds of variations of it. It’s almost like Harry Potter sorting hats. Surgeons may think they’re a certain alignment philosophy, but the data we found with some of our surgeon developers are like, ‘Wow, I thought I was Hufflepuff, but [they’re a Gryffindor]. They love the fact that the data that we’re showing them around the decisions they made as Rosa captures all that, it feeds back into what alignment philosophy are you actually deploying, irrespective of what you think you are deploying. I thought this was really interesting. Many of the surgeons say, ‘I have these edge cases where I have a decision box that I’m making.’ There’s art in that. ‘How far do I do this? What kind of flexibility do they have in their soft tissue? How much do I probably want to make up for some long-standing alignment challenges they’ve had throughout their life?’ That’s an edge case. Now we give them the ability to get that playback off those decisions they made where they can say, ‘Wow, you know what? I’ve seen about 10 of those turn out. I’m going to be a little more aggressive in the fact that I’ll follow that philosophy more,’ or, ‘I’m not seeing the results that I would have expected,’ so they’ll adjust. … Our ability to leverage data, this personalized intelligence layer across all the assets we have, from a PACS imaging perspective, with Medstrat, from MyMobility all the way across to ZBEdge Analytics, we feel it’s just going to really put into surgeons’ hands their data, their decisions, and their journey going forward with their patients.”

What innovations do you need from other medtech developers to advance your technology?

Braun: “Surgical navigation in the operating room. There’s a huge amount of opportunity. … When you think about inefficiency in the operating room, if there can be more real-time registration with — let’s be honest, our phones have got some incredible cameras and LiDAR — there’s a ton of technology out there today that when it gets to a point that it can be deployed, [it] will really speed up the registration process that robotic platforms have to navigate.”

Read more: Tips to help device developers get paid from smart ortho implant maker Canary Medical

About The Author

Chris Newmarker

Chris Newmarker is the executive editor of WTWH Media life science's news websites and publications including MassDevice, Medical Design & Outsourcing and more. A professional journalist of 18 years, he is a veteran of UBM (now Informa) and The Associated Press whose career has taken him from Ohio to Virginia, New Jersey and, most recently, Minnesota. He’s covered a wide variety of subjects, but his focus over the past decade has been business and technology. He holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science from Ohio State University. Connect with him on LinkedIn or email at cnewmarker@wtwhmedia.com.

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