KneeEd

Methodology

How KneeEd reads your sessions

Your plan adapts based on what you tell us and what your sessions show. Here is what our system does, what it does not do, and where a real clinician should always be the judge. Plain language, real architecture, no marketing.

What KneeEd does

  • Reads the survey you complete and produces a multi-week movement plan with phases tuned to your category: Recovery, Performance, Prevention, or Maintenance.
  • Adjusts your plan after each session based on the pain and difficulty you report. A plan that was the right shape last week may not be the right shape today.
  • Writes a short coaching note after a session you log, voiced for where you are in the program.
  • Catches contraindications before they reach you, via a deterministic safety stage that the AI cannot bypass.

What KneeEd is not

  • Not a diagnosis. We do not tell you what is wrong with your body.
  • Not a prescription. Plans are educational, adherence-support tools, not medical treatment.
  • Not a substitute for your physical therapist, physician, or surgeon. Bring your plan to them. We help you stay on track between visits.
  • Not an emergency service. If pain is severe, sudden, or paired with new symptoms, stop and seek qualified help.

The pipeline

Eight stages, one plan

Your plan passes through eight stages from intake to delivery. Some stages use AI; some are deterministic rules. Safety is always deterministic.

  1. 01

    Profile extraction

    AI

    Reads your survey and produces a structured profile: region, condition, severity, surgical status, activity goals.

    Stage 1 of 8
  2. 02

    Protocol matching

    Rule

    Maps your profile to a clinical protocol template: evidence-informed, condition-specific, with phase progression rules.

    Stage 2 of 8
  3. 03

    Exercise pool

    Rule

    Builds a candidate pool of exercises filtered by region, phase, difficulty, and contraindications for your condition.

    Stage 3 of 8
  4. 04

    Exercise selection

    AI

    Selects and customizes specific exercises from the pool to fit your phase, frequency, and progression rate.

    Stage 4 of 8
  5. 05

    Safety validation

    Rule

    The non-negotiable stage. Removes anything the model picked that is not in the phase-appropriate pool built in stage 03, and substitutes from the same category. AI cannot override.

    Stage 5 of 8
  6. 05b

    Quality evaluation

    AI

    Scores plan quality on completeness, safety surface, and patient relevance. Non-critical: fails open with logged warnings.

    Stage 6 of 8
  7. 06

    Nutrition guidance

    Rule

    Generates condition-aware nutrition recommendations: recovery-supportive macros, anti-inflammatory considerations.

    Stage 7 of 8
  8. 07

    Product recommendations

    Rule

    Surfaces orthopedic supports, braces, or recovery tools relevant to your condition. Non-critical, can be skipped.

    Stage 8 of 8

Safety

Where the safety checking actually happens

Every plan KneeEd builds for you passes through a deterministic safety validator before it becomes active, and none can be saved without it. The filtering by condition and phase happens earlier, when we build the candidate pool your plan is drawn from, and the validator then removes anything the model selected that is not in that pool and substitutes an alternative from the same category. The AI cannot override it.

Being specific about the limits, because they matter more than the mechanism. Our condition-specific rules currently cover 31 conditions, and 111 of our 600 exercises carry contraindication tags. Where we have no rule for your condition, the plan is still built from a phase-appropriate pool but no condition-specific filtering has been applied. Sport and training plans are filtered by pain and impact level only, not by contraindication rules. Surgical status is not one of the filters.

For a plan you adopt from another member, KneeEd has no intake for that plan, so it applies a conservative safety floor instead and does not claim to have checked the plan against your condition.

A plan you compose yourself keeps every movement you chose. It is not checked against a clinical protocol for your condition, and its movements are not screened for contraindications. KneeEd attaches conservative safety notes to it that say exactly that.

Regulatory posture

Where we sit, by design

KneeEd is an educational and adherence-support product, not a medical device and not a covered entity. Here is how your data is held, what consent we ask for before the system writes you a plan, and the line we do not cross.

HIPAA

PHI-shaped data handling

Patient data is treated as PHI. Row-level security scopes every authenticated query to the person it belongs to. Service-role access is reserved for server operations, and the consequential ones, exporting your record, deleting your account, sharing or publishing a plan, write an audit-log entry with the actor, the action and the request address.

MHMDA + state privacy

Consumer health data, by the letter

Data Subject Rights are handled within the 45-day window required by Washington's MHMDA, and an export or deletion you ask for in the app runs immediately. AI plan generation requires a consent record for that category, separate from Terms of Service acceptance, and when the methodology version moves, the consent is asked for again.

FDA posture

Education and adherence support

KneeEd is educational and adherence-support software. Not a medical device, not a diagnostic, not a treatment. Every plan view carries the safety notes for your condition and the health disclaimer, and we make no therapeutic claims.

Per-plan transparency

See what safety changed

Where the safety stage swapped a movement out of your plan or dropped one, the swap is named on the plan itself, phase by phase, alongside the warnings and red flags for your condition.

Take your record with you

Export to your clinician

One file with your profile, surveys, plans, sessions and the pain you logged with them, your plan adjustments and your consent record. Free, and the request is audit-logged. Plan Club Pro members can also export a FHIR R4 bundle for a clinical system.

Download your record

Methodology changelog

What changed and when

  1. v2026.09.0

    2026-09-15

    Removed the live counters, the advisory board section, and every description of something we have not built yet from the methodology page. What is left is what runs today.

  2. v2026.05.2

    2026-05-06

    Added a public platform stats strip, a clinical advisory board surface, and explicit regulatory and security posture sections so investors, partner clinicians, and reporters see real numbers and named controls before the prose.

  3. v2026.05.1

    2026-05-04

    Disclosed that we are pursuing Business Associate Agreements with our AI vendors, and added a Minors and Family Accounts section so a parent, coach, or athletic trainer can manage athletes ages 13-17 with full responsibility for consents and data.

  4. v2026.05.0

    2026-05-03

    First public methodology release. KneeEd's plan engine now describes itself in plain language: what it reads, what it suggests, and where a real clinician should always be the judge.