Kinn in use

Inspiration

Recovery is full of guesswork. After a knee injury, you’re told to “take it easy,” but nobody tells you what that means day to day. People either push too hard and set themselves back, or get scared and don’t move enough. Kinn started as Poise, a posture sensor for shoulder slouching, but customer conversations with PTs and patients showed a bigger gap: people recovering on their own, between appointments, with no feedback at all.

What it does

Kinn is a thin, flexible sensor tape for your knee, paired with an app. It tracks every bend through the day and alerts your phone when you push past your safe range. It also logs cumulative joint use, so you can see how much you’re actually moving. AI validates your movements and tracks flare-ups and pain over time. The goal is to give you the confidence to exercise or rest, and to shorten your recovery. Get stronger. Push forward. Trust your comeback.

How we built it

Hardware: A kinesiology-tape-style strip with printed sensing traces and an ultra-thin swappable pod. The pod runs on a coin cell, so there’s nothing to recharge. We designed it in Fusion 360 and rendered it in Blender.

Software: We vibe-coded the app and pitch screens, focusing on a clean, minimal experience. Brand and site: We built a black, monochrome teaser site with a scroll-driven intro that pulls back from a close-up of the traces to the full product. The footage was generated with Higgsfield. The site is deployed on Railway with an email waitlist.

Discovery: We ran interviews with PTs and patients to shape the direction. Challenges we ran into

Narrowing the scope. We went from posture, to general PT tracking, to knee recovery. Choosing one use case was hard but necessary.

Comfort vs. hardware. We had to fit sensing and power into something flat, stretchy and comfortable enough to wear all day.'

Audience. We had to decide whether Kinn was a tool for clinicians or a product for anyone recovering. We chose anyone recovering.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

A product concept that looks like tape, not a gadget A sharp, consistent brand and a live site collecting waitlist signups Pivoting based on real user conversations instead of our first assumption

What we learned

Talk to users early. Our best ideas came from patients, not our sketches. Focus beats breadth. One joint and one problem makes a stronger product. In health products, how confident the experience makes you feel matters as much as the data.

What’s next for Kinn

Continue building a working prototype with sensors integrated into athletic tape Test the safe-range alerts with real knee-recovery users Grow the waitlist and validate demand with pre-orders Expand to other joints, with one reusable pod that moves between Kinn products