Genura™

A mobile app designed to support people through the hardest, most disorienting weeks of knee replacement recovery.

The Problem

Knee replacement is one of the most common orthopedic surgeries, and one of the least well-supported once the patient goes home. To understand what actually goes wrong during recovery, I read through dozens of real posts on Reddit and BoneSmart, a longstanding joint-replacement patient community, and found the same six frustrations surfacing again and again:

  1. Sleep problems in the weeks after surgery

  2. The mental and emotional toll being consistently underestimated

  3. Feeling under-informed by doctors and surgeons

  4. Physical therapy that feels inadequate or unclear

  5. Persistent pain and dissatisfaction with the pace of recovery

  6. Fear and uncertainty around basic mobility milestones

Underneath all six is the same set of needs: people recovering from knee replacement want to sleep better, feel calmer, be genuinely informed, and know they're making real progress, even on the days it doesn't feel that way.

The Approach

I designed Genura™ around a single idea: reduce the cognitive and emotional load of recovery; don't add to it. Every decision in the app, from the number of menu items to the words used in a warning banner, was filtered through that goal.

The app is built around the surgery date as its anchor. Patients can set it up before surgery, while they still have the bandwidth to learn a new tool, so it's already familiar by the time they're recovering and have far less capacity to spare. Past or future surgery dates are both supported, since not everyone downloads the app in advance.

I also designed for a specific failure mode I saw in every competing product: people set an app up once and never open it again. So the content is built to reward return visits, not just onboarding, through daily tips, a milestone system, and a check-in that takes under two minutes.

The Prototype
Home Screen of Genura prototype
exercises screen of Genura prototype
log screen of Genura prototype 
Next Steps

The next phase is user feedback, focused on three questions: is the content genuinely useful, is the app easy to use day to day, and, just as importantly, how does using it make people feel. For an app built specifically to reduce fear and cognitive load during a hard recovery, that last question matters as much as any usability metric.