After each exercise the app asks for a number from 0 to 10. People often hesitate, because the question feels unanswerable: pain is not a quantity, and a 6 for you might be a 3 for someone else. The good news is that the comparison between you and someone else does not matter. What matters is that your 6 today means the same as your 6 last week, and that takes only a little care.
What the ends mean
Zero is no pain at all. Ten is the worst pain you can imagine, not the worst you have had. Most people's rehab exercises sit between 0 and 5, and that is by design: programmes that allow some pain during exercise usually cap it around 5, provided it settles afterwards. If you are regularly choosing 7 or higher during an exercise, that is a message to send, not a number to keep logging.
Rate the same moment every time
The biggest source of noise is not the number but the moment. "Pain during the exercise" and "pain now that I have stopped" can differ by several points. Pick one, and if your therapist has told you which, use that. KineTrue asks per exercise, so the honest answer is the worst it got while you were doing that exercise. Rate the exercise, not your day, not your knee in general, and not how worried you are about it.
How big a change counts
A landmark 2001 study in the journal Pain pooled 2,724 people with chronic pain across ten trials and compared their daily 0 to 10 scores with how much better they said they felt overall. A drop of about 2 points, or about 30 percent, lined up with patients saying they were "much improved". That 2-point figure is now the standard benchmark in pain research. A 2022 reanalysis in Pain Practice found many patients needed a larger drop, closer to 3.5 points, before they called themselves clearly better, and that the amount depended on where they started. The lesson for home tracking is simple: one point up or down between sessions is noise. Two or more points, sustained over several sessions, is a signal.
Common traps
- Rounding up to be taken seriously. Your therapist already takes it seriously. An inflated number makes the trend useless.
- Rounding down to seem like a good patient. Same problem in reverse. The number is information, not a grade.
- Rating fear instead of pain. A movement can be frightening and not very painful. Rate the sensation.
- Letting last week's number anchor this week's. Decide first, then look at the history.
- Changing the moment. If you rated "during" last week and "after" this week, the drop is not real.
How your therapist uses it
In KineTrue the pain rating sits beside the reps or hold time, range of motion, and quality score for that exercise, across every session. Your therapist is reading the pairing: a pain score climbing while reps fall means one thing, pain steady while range of motion grows means another. For why they ask at all, read why your therapist asks about pain before and after exercise.
A pain score describes intensity, not cause. New pain in a different place, pain with numbness or weakness, or pain that wakes you at night needs a conversation with your therapist or doctor whatever the number is.