Kineon Review: My Honest Test on Knee Osteoarthritis Since December 2023
I have diagnosed osteoarthritis in my knee, confirmed on imaging and I got this device in December 2023 to do something about it. So this Kineon review is not a two week impression written from a loaner unit. It is what I think after living with the same MOVE+ Pro through a couple of winters, a hamstring injury, several knee osteoarthritis flares and a lot of heavy squats.
I lift five days a week and I am in the menopausal transition, which is a combination that asks a lot of a knee that already has wear in it. What follows is what has held up, what I would tell a coaching client and the one thing about this whole category that almost no review will say out loud.
Table of Contents-Click to Expand
- Quick Verdict
- What the Kineon MOVE+ Pro Is
- The Thing No Recovery Device Review Will Tell You
- What the Research Shows for Knee Osteoarthritis
- How I Have Used It Since December 2023
- Durability After Nearly Three Years
- Kineon Compared to My Sauna and My Theragun
- What It Costs, Including the HSA and FSA Angle
- Who Should Buy It and Who Should Not
- How I Keep This Review Current
- Frequently Asked Questions
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Quick Verdict
My Rating: 4.4 out of 5
Best for: Anyone with diagnosed knee osteoarthritis or a chronically cranky joint who wants a drug free option they will use often enough to matter, and who has already covered the basics of strength training, protein and sleep.
What it gets right: It has not broken. Not one module, not one battery, not the strap, across nearly three years of use. It uses the 808nm laser wavelength that holds up best in knee trials rather than the cheaper LED only approach. And because it straps on and leaves your hands free, it is the only recovery tool I own that I use without having to talk myself into it.
Where it falls short: I cannot prove it did anything. Neither can anyone else who owns one, and I will explain why below. The 499 dollar price is a real commitment before you know whether you respond. The extender strap you need for a hip or a lower back is a separate purchase. And the evidence behind it is stronger for joint pain than for the muscle injury I also used it on.
Price: 499 dollars, down from a 699 dollar list price, and eligible for HSA and FSA funds when you buy direct.
What the Kineon MOVE+ Pro Is
The Kineon MOVE+ Pro has three small modules ride on a strap that you wrap around a joint. Each module puts out two kinds of light at once: deep red at 660 nanometres from LEDs, and near-infrared at 808 nanometres from actual laser diodes. You press a button, one module wakes the other two and you get a five, 10 or 15 minute session with the light sitting directly against your skin.
A note on the name, because it trips people up. My unit came boxed as the MOVE+ Pro, which is what you will see in my photos. Kineon currently sells it as the MOVE+ LED & Laser. You will also see a YouTube video calling it the Move+ 2.0, which is a reviewer's label rather than a product Kineon sells and plenty of people simply type Move Plus. Every Kineon review you find under any of those names is describing the same device family.
The category is called photobiomodulation and it's a very well studied category. The short version of the mechanism is that these particular wavelengths get absorbed by mitochondria, which then produce more ATP, which supports repair and blood flow in the tissue you pointed the light at. That much is settled cell biology. Whether it changes how your knee feels is a separate question and the rest of this review is about that question.
Here is what is in the box and what the hardware does, checked against Kineon's current published specifications rather than my memory of the manual.
| Specification | Kineon MOVE+ Pro |
|---|---|
| Modules | Three per unit, two emission areas on each |
| Red light | Eight 660nm deep-red LEDs per module, 20mW each, 160mW per module |
| Near-infrared | Ten 808nm Class 1 laser diodes per module, 5mW each, 50mW per module |
| Module size | 59 x 37 x 37mm |
| Battery | Roughly four hours of continuous use per module, about 24 ten minute sessions. Full charge takes about 3.5 hours |
| Strap range | 8.5 inches at the shortest, 39.5 inches fully extended |
| In the box | Three modules, adjustable strap, travel case, charge case, cable, manual. The extender strap is not included |
| Warranty | One year, with lifetime customer support |
| Money back guarantee | 30 days. Kineon asks for daily use of five to fifteen minutes per area, up to a 30 minute maximum per area, for at least three to four weeks. If nothing has improved, they refund |
Two details there are worth pulling out here. The first is that the extender strap is a separate purchase. If you are buying this mainly for a hip or a lower back rather than a knee, budget for it. Mine is an older version and the current one looks different, so check what fits your unit before ordering.
The second is the strap generation. Kineon now ships a Strap 3.0 with quick-release clips. Mine is the older buckle design, which you can see in the dated photos further down. Any complaint I have about fiddling with the strap is a complaint about 2023 hardware and may not apply to a unit bought today.
The Thing No Recovery Device Review Will Tell You
Here is the problem with every review of every recovery device, including this one. I cannot run a controlled trial on my own knee.
When my hamstring settled down after I tweaked it deadlifting in January 2025, I have no way of knowing whether the light did that or whether six weeks of sensible loading did that. There is no version of me who skipped the device so I can compare. I only got the one timeline and this is the same thing that applies to any product of this type. Did it get better because of time and natural healing or would it have taken even longer to heal without the photobiomodulation therapy?
This applies to my sauna, my magnesium, my sleep tracking and everything else in the recovery drawer. Researchers can compare a treated group against a sham group across dozens of people. You, sitting on your couch with a sore knee, cannot. So when a review tells you a device cured someone's plantar fasciitis in two weeks, that is one person's single timeline, not evidence the device caused it. As an example, most plantar fasciitis and other injures improve with rest and time.
I am spending three paragraphs on this because the search results for this product are close to uniformly glowing and I think that is doing readers a disservice. What I can tell you is narrower and more useful: the published evidence for this specific intervention on this specific joint is reasonable, the wavelength Kineon chose is the one that performs best in that research, the device has not broken in nearly three years and I keep using it. Anytime I have a body part in pain or strain, I choose the Kineon as one of my recovery tools. Those are all checkable claims. “It healed me” is not.
One more thing in this vein. Kineon's own marketing says customers report an 80 percent reduction in pain. Using it daily when you have chronic pain is different than using it for an acute flare up or injury.
What the Research Shows for Knee Osteoarthritis
Because I have a diagnosis rather than a vague ache, the osteoarthritis literature is the part I care about most. It is stronger than I expected and more qualified than the marketing suggests.
The most directly relevant trial is a 2025 double-blind randomised controlled study in Lasers in Medical Science, which put 65 people with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis into photobiomodulation, sham or no-treatment groups. Around 84 percent of the participants were women, which is unusual and makes the findings more applicable to many of the people who read this site. The treated group showed significant reductions in pain and improvements in stiffness and function. The sham and control groups did not move.
For a wider view, a 2025 network meta-analysis in PLoS One pooled 139 randomised trials covering 9,644 knee osteoarthritis patients across twelve different treatments. Low level laser therapy landed in the upper tier for pain both at rest and during activity. However, a knee brace, hydrotherapy and plain exercise all scored slihgtly better overall. Light therapy is a legitimate part of the conversation, but maybe not the very best thing you can do for an arthritic knee. If you are choosing between this device and starting a structured strength training program, start with the training.
The wavelength detail is where Kineon earns some credit. A 2023 trial in Scientific Reports compared 808nm against 660nm against a sham in knee osteoarthritis patients and found the 808nm group gained significantly more knee extensor strength than either. The 808nm laser diodes are exactly what this device uses, so the hardware matches the wavelength with the best joint data rather than the wavelength that is cheapest to build.
Kineon's own site leans on an unnamed 2019 meta-analysis and so do several of the reviews ranking for this device, so it is worth saying which paper that is and what it found. It is a 2019 systematic review in BMJ Open pooling 22 placebo-controlled trials and 1,063 knee osteoarthritis patients. Pain was meaningfully lower than placebo at the end of treatment and stayed lower at follow-up, with the effect peaking two to four weeks after treatment stopped and the benefit held for wavelengths between 785 and 860nm, a window that includes the 808nm Kineon uses.
Two things the brand does not mention when it cites this paper: it opens by noting that laser therapy is not recommended in the major knee osteoarthritis treatment guidelines and it has since been superseded in scope by the 2025 analysis of 139 trials I described above. The finding is real but not the most recent.
On the training side, a 2021 meta-analysis in Sports Health pulled together 24 randomised trials in athletes and found that laser therapy applied before exercise improved lower limb strength at 24, 48 and 96 hours and even at eight weeks, alongside lower creatine kinase and interleukin-6. Worth knowing if you lift and worth noting that the benefit showed up when the light came before the session rather than after.
Now the honest counterweight. A 2024 review in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology looked specifically at acute and subacute injury and concluded that results for deeper tissue damage are inconsistent, partly because laser settings vary so much between studies that comparing them is difficult. Surface wound healing and pre-exercise conditioning have better support than treating a fresh muscle tear. Which is just to say that using it for the hamstring thing I did in January 2025 is the least evidence-backed way I use this device.
The gap in the research that affects women like me
Joint pain during the menopausal transition is common and badly served. A 2024 cohort study in Pain followed 609 women through the transition and found that musculoskeletal pain rose in both prevalence and severity as they progressed, with the late transition acting as a trigger point for new pain. A 2024 review in Maturitas from a Mayo Clinic team goes further, linking falling estrogen to joint stiffness, cartilage changes and greater susceptibility to osteoarthritis itself. So this is not aging generally and it is not imagination.
What does not exist, as far as I can find, is a single photobiomodulation trial in perimenopausal or postmenopausal women looking at hormonally driven joint pain. That is a real hole. Everything I described above is extrapolated from mixed or general populations.
I am a NASM certified personal trainer and I have written about health for two decades, but I am not a physician and none of this is medical advice for your knee. If you have joint pain that has not been looked at, get it imaged before you buy equipment for it.