What your casting families could hand you at the next visit

Between appointments, the record is whatever the family remembers. Brace hours get estimated at the desk, under pressure, by a parent who does not want to give the wrong answer. Clubfoot Forward is a free app that keeps that record instead, and prints it as a PDF the family brings with them. Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing for your clinic to install, license or approve.

Built by Heath, an adult with bilateral clubfoot treated from birth. Not a clinician.

In one minute

What it is, and what it is not

FreeOn iPhone and Android. No account, no subscription, nothing to buy.

Held by the familyRecords stay on their phone. Nothing is uploaded to me or to anyone else.

OfflineEverything opens with no signal, which matters in a clinic basement and matters more in a low-resource program.

Not a diagnosticIt records what the family enters. It does not interpret, score a foot, or advise on treatment, and it says so on the screen.

The gap

You see the foot. You do not see the six weeks before it

Correction happens in your clinic. Everything that decides whether it holds happens somewhere else, in a house, at night, for years. The two things most likely to matter are whether the brace went on for the hours it was meant to and whether anything changed in between, and both arrive at your desk as a recollection.

Non-compliance is not a rare event either. In a cohort of 247 braced children at one hospital it ran at 33.2 percent, with heel lifting in 25.1 percent and recasting in 31.2 percent.1 Those are the families in front of you, and the conversation about it usually starts with an estimate nobody can check.

This app does not fix adherence. It gives the family somewhere to put what actually happened, so the conversation starts from a record instead of from an apology.

The record

What families log

Stage	What the app holds
Casting	Each cast in the series, with its Pirani and Dimeglio scores charted over time, plus a note when a cast comes off early and why
Tenotomy	Logged with its date, inside the same series
Bracing	A one-tap wear timer, optional night and morning reminders, and a before and after comparison when the setup changes
Appointments	A question list built before the visit and kept open in the room, and what was said, recorded before the family gets home
Afterwards	The adult side: pain check-ins, function and activity, past surgeries with documents, progress photos, footwear and orthotics

The last row is the part I care most about, for a reason that is personal. My own pediatric file closed a few weeks before I turned eighteen, and for the next twenty-three years there was nowhere for any of it to go. The patients you are casting this month will be forty-one one day, and they will want the record you are creating now.

At the visit

What you receive

The family taps Share with Doctor and hands you a PDF. It carries the casting series with its scores, brace hours against the prescription, the brace in use, milestones, what the parent has observed, appointments and their questions. It separates what the family recorded from anything the app worked out, so a trend line is never presented to you as a finding.

It arrives the way a paper diary arrives: from the patient, in the room. There is no portal, no login, no integration and no data-sharing agreement, because nothing ever leaves their device to begin with.

The first page of a real summarySample data, not a patient. It opens by saying what it is and what it is not, and every section carries a label showing where the information came from.

Casting history from a sample Clubfoot Forward provider summary: Pirani score by cast falling from 6.0 at cast one to 1.0 at cast five, with each cast listed by date, clinic and the day it came off. — **The casting series, as one picture**Pirani by cast, then every cast with its date, the clinic and when it came off. Scores are whatever the family was told at the visit, recorded as told.

Bracing summary from a sample Clubfoot Forward provider summary: hours worn per night across 45 nights against a 14 hour target, the brace in use with its bar width and angles, 40 of 45 nights logged, an average of 13.7 hours and 87 percent of target. — **Brace hours, against the prescription**Forty-five nights with the prescribed target drawn across them, and the nights with nothing logged left visibly empty. The brace itself is recorded too, down to the bar width and the angles it is set to.

Record checks section of a sample Clubfoot Forward provider summary: overlapping brace sessions none found, days recording over 24 hours of wear none found, 40 brace sessions checked, followed by the current treatment context. — **The app checks the record before you see it**Overlapping sessions and days claiming more than 24 hours of wear are looked for and reported either way. A record that says what it checked is easier to trust than one that does not.

Honest limitation. Nobody has studied whether this app changes adherence, correction or relapse. I am not going to claim that it does. What I can say is what it records, and I would rather find out properly than assert it. See the trial below.

The questions you will ask

Privacy, cost and what it is funded by

Where does the data live?

On the family’s phone. Check-ins, cast entries, brace logs, photos, documents and appointment notes are stored locally and are not sent anywhere in the background. There is no account to create.

Does anything leave the device?

A device identifier goes to the advertising network that funds the app. That is disclosed on the App Store privacy label, in the Google Play data safety section and in the privacy policy. The health record itself is not part of that, and is not shared.

What does it cost a clinic?

Nothing. There is no clinic version, no license and no invoice. The app is free to families on both stores, and I am not asking you to buy, host or support anything.

Is it a medical device?

No. It is a record-keeping tool. It does not calculate a diagnosis, recommend treatment, or tell a family whether a foot is correcting. Every screen that shows a pattern states that interpretation belongs to a clinician who has examined the patient.

Who wrote it?

I did. I have bilateral clubfoot, was casted from the birth admission in 1985, had a posteromedial release at four months, a second release on the left before I was three, and a triple arthrodesis at sixteen. I am not a clinician and the app never pretends to be one.

What if a family does not have a smartphone?

Then this is not for them, and paper is fine. The app is an option to offer, not a requirement to impose, and no part of a family’s care should depend on it.

If you want to try it

A three-month trial, and an honest answer at the end

Here is the version I would most like to do. Offer the app to families starting casting for three months. At the end, tell me two things: whether anyone turned up with the PDF, and whether it made the visit better or worse. That is all.

If the answer is that nobody used it, I will say so publicly, because a tool that families do not use is worth knowing about and I have withdrawn my own published work before when the data did not hold. If it does help, that is the start of something worth writing up properly, with your name on it rather than mine.

I can supply printable cards with a code that opens the app on either phone, a one-page summary for your team, and a sample of the PDF so you can see the output before a single family installs anything.

Other ways to work together →

What the app does, in full → Ask for the trial pack → How this site works →

Sources

Where this comes from

1 Pressure sores and bracing complications in idiopathic clubfootKollias et al. Prosthetics and Orthotics International, 2026. PMID 42149778

Written by Heath, founder of Clubfoot Forward, an adult with bilateral clubfoot, childhood surgery and a triple arthrodesis. He is not a clinician and nothing here is clinical guidance. The app is a patient-held record and is not a medical device, not a diagnostic and not a substitute for examination. Reviewed September 2026. See the editorial policy.