Joint replacement surgery is one of the most successful operations performed to date. Hip and knee replacement surgery offers the ability to dramatically improve the lives of patients from both a pain and a functional standpoint. With that said, as successful as joint replacement surgery has become, there are always limitations to any operation. Over the decades, we have looked to technology to improve the accuracy, consistency and surgical outcomes of joint replacement surgery for patients. Our current endeavors see the growth of sensors, robotics, and the promise of AI empowering surgeons to perform joint replacement surgery in better ways than ever thought possible. During this discussion, I will explore the current state of sensors, both external and implantable, I will discuss the robotic revolution and highlight the advantages it has over traditional surgery, and I will look to the future of joint replacement surgery including the potential power that AI will bring to the everyday operating theater.

Recent advances in attaining ultra low loss highly confining silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with loss in the dB-per-meter range, and their heterogeneous integration with MEMS and ferro-electrical PICs have opened up novel applications that benefit not only from scalable manufacturing, compact form factor and low power, but crucially have now reached a point where the performance is on par and even exceeding that of legacy optical systems. I will describe a range of novel advances, including photonic integrated circuit based frequency agile lasers with fiber laser phase noise, parametric traveling wave amplifiers, Erbium amplifiers on chip, as well as soliton frequency combs, with applications from coherent communications, LiDAR to cryogenic quantum interconnects. In addition, I will described novel ferro-electrical PICs based on Lithium Tantalate that offer ultra-fast optical modulation.