Heel2Toe™ Docking Station

What’s new

These notes cover everything since version 8.3: 9.4 first, then the releases before it (9.3, 9.2, 9.1 and 9.0), newest first. If you are coming from 9.0 or earlier, all of it is new to you.

Clinics get a team, exercise plans and each client’s week. Therapists can have their own accounts in a clinic, clients can be assigned to them, clinicians can prescribe exercises, and selecting a client shows their week. Uploading now shows its progress, and the numbers across the app have been put right: the Walk-BEST score counts all five measures, fall risk only shows a warning when it is high, and several screens that disagreed now agree.

Clinics: a team, not a shared login

Until now everyone at a clinic signed in with one account. Now each therapist can have their own.

Team tab. Clinic opens with a new Team tab, before Clients. It lists the clinic’s Administrators and Therapists, each with their email, phone and number of clients. A clinic can have more than one admin.Invite. On Team, press Invite, enter the therapist’s email and choose Therapist or Admin. The invitation email comes from you (“Dr. Ted via Heel2Toe”), replies go to you, and it links to the page where they install the Docking Station. When they sign in with that address, the invitation is waiting on their Home screen; Accept switches their account to the clinic. Someone already on the team can’t be invited twice, and an accepted invitation leaves the list at once.Remove. The red bin on a member’s row removes them from the clinic, after an “are you sure?”. Their clients stay with the clinic, and their account goes back to working on its own. You can invite them again later.My profile. Everyone at the clinic can set their own name and phone: admins from the pencil on their row in Team, therapists from the new profile card on Home. A new name shows straight away wherever it appears, including the client’s Your therapist: ….

Clinics: clients and their therapists

Assign clients. On Team, Assign clients on a therapist’s row opens a checklist of every client; one already with someone else says Now with …. In the client list, the Assign to a therapist icon on a row does the same for one client.Admins see every client. Only therapists are assigned clients. A client with no therapist shows Admin in the new Therapist column, and Team shows how many clients have none yet.A therapist’s view. A therapist’s new clients are theirs automatically, and the client list opens on My clients (switch it off to see everyone). Messages and exercise plans show the therapist’s name, and the client sees Your therapist: … under My Clinic.Admins keep the clinic’s controls. Only admins see Team and Clinic Settings, and only admins can delete clients or run a cleanup. A therapist doesn’t see Delete at all.Live. Assigning a client, renaming someone or accepting an invitation shows on every computer without leaving the screen.Sort the list. Click a heading in the client list (Client Name, Therapist, Sessions, Last Session, Heel2Toe, Link Status) to sort by it; click again to reverse. The ↕ beside each heading shows which ones sort.One way to edit a client, from the client’s view (the eye), with their mobile phone and therapist. The pencil at the end of each row is gone.Nothing changes for a clinic that keeps one shared login: that account is the clinic’s admin.

Clinics: Heel2Toe devices for therapists

Therapists now see Heel2Toe Devices: every device and its loan history. They can loan an available device to one of their own clients, and return the loans they made. Adding, editing and deleting devices, and returning anyone else’s loan, stay with admins. Each loan now records who made it (Loaned by).

Clinics: prescribe exercises

A client’s profile (Clinic → Clients → client) has a new Exercises section. Prescribe exercises opens the nine Walk-BEST chair exercises: tick the ones you want, set the sets, repetitions and times per week, and add a note. With Tell the client on, the client gets a message in the app, by email and by text.

The client sees the plan under My Clinic → Your exercises, with each picture (tap to enlarge), how many and how often, and your note. The exercises are called Exercise A to I until they have names.

Clinics: each client’s week

Selecting a client on the clinic’s Home screen now shows that client’s Weekly Summary: sessions this week against last week, Walk-BEST and its trend, good steps, the fatigue badge, the day-by-day heat maps and the summary sentence. It is worked out from the client’s own sessions, so it works for every client, including those who never use the app themselves.

When a client has no sessions yet this week, the card shows how long it has been (12 days since the last session) and their last active week.

The client’s own prompts stay with the client: the clinic’s view has no weekly goal, no “when will you walk next?” question and no reminder settings.

Plain names and explanations for the walking measures

The five gait measures now have one name each across the app, and a one-line explanation, taken from Getting the most from your Heel2Toe sensor:

Heel strike: how fast the foot rotates as the heel lands.Push-off: how fast the foot rotates as it pushes off.Foot swing (was “Foot Clearance”): how fast the foot swings forward between steps.Power cycle: heel strike and push-off together, the parts of each step that propel you forward.Balance cycle: how long you stand on one foot while the other swings.

The Gait Quality screens explain how to read the bars (bigger is better for the top bar, lower for the variability bar; aim for the green), and Cadence, Fatigue, Gait Compare and Recommended Exercises each say what they show. On Cadence, 80–120 steps a minute is now shown as the safe range (80–100 was yellow). The weekly summary now recommends 6 minutes, twice a day.

Heel strike values are in degrees per second (°/s); the session details window said “d/s²”.

Walk-BEST now counts all five measures

Some clients’ Walk-BEST scores will go up. Two of the five measures that make up the score, the power phase and the balance phase, were not being counted properly, so up to a quarter of the score was missing for every session. They now count like the other three.

Walk-BEST also stops at 100. It could show 101.

Scores before and after this release are therefore not directly comparable. A client whose score rises on updating hasn’t changed how they walk.

Fall risk: a warning only when it’s high

The Risk of Fall card showed a warning triangle whatever the risk. It now shows:

a warning at 60% and above;an information symbol from 20% to 59%;a shield below 20%.

Numbers that now agree with each other

Good steps %. A session with 1% good steps showed as 100%. Fixed.Upload minimum: 30 seconds everywhere. The message, the tick check and the automatic ticking after extract now use the same minimum. Sessions shorter than 30 seconds can’t be uploaded and aren’t ticked automatically.Variability above 100% on the Gait Quality screens was coloured Excellent. It is now Poor.History now plots sessions in date order, so its trend line goes the right way, and the title names the measure you chose (it always said Heel Strike History). “Regression slope” is now Trend per session.Gait Quality History: Foot Clearance no longer shows a minus sign it doesn’t have.Duration heat map: the legend now reads ≥ 6 min · 3 to under 6 min · < 3 min; minutes 5–6 had no label.

Extract and upload: see where each session is

The SD Card card finds the device by itself. Before you pressed Extract it could look in the wrong place and report 0 new sessions, 0 previously processed with a full card in the dock. It now finds the Heel2Toe on its own and counts straight away.Upload shows its progress. Each session row shows a blue spinner while it uploads, then an orange one while our server processes it, then a green cloud ✓. The SD Card card says how many are being processed and moves them to previously processed when they’re done, usually within a minute or two.Sessions already in the cloud are marked. After extract they appear in light green with the green ✓, and they’re unticked, so they can’t be sent twice.

Session details after extract

The Session details window now shows the threshold that actually applied:

Manual mode: the Good Step Threshold that was set, and the good steps against it.Auto Mode: where Auto Mode finished, the good steps against Auto Mode’s moving bar, and the good steps against the Good Step Threshold. These are the two counts the Auto Mode help text has always described.

It used to show an unrelated number labelled Auto Threshold, and only when Auto Mode was off.

Messages from your clinic: clear and archive

Under My Clinic, Clear messages moves your clinic’s messages out of the way, after asking. They’re kept under View archived messages. This is on your device only: your clinic still has every message.

Analytics CSV export works on phones and tablets

Analytics → Download CSV now opens your device’s Save dialog, so it works on Android and iOS as well as computers. It used to ask for a folder, which Android doesn’t allow. Dates in the file are now ordinary dates, and accented names open correctly in Excel.

In your language

The History and Gait Quality History screens, the “target” on every Gait Quality bar, and the session details window were partly in English whatever the app’s language. They are now translated.

Also fixed in 9.4.2

A client’s profile shows their email, not an internal ID. The Client ID line under the name is gone; the email the client was linked or invited by is shown at the top instead. Lists of team members say Unknown rather than an ID when someone has no name or email yet.Upload ends cleanly. After a successful upload the window no longer says No files selected for upload, and click to start is greyed out once there is nothing left to send.macOS: docking a Heel2Toe no longer shows “Operation not permitted”. macOS only lets the app read the device after you choose it once, so on a Mac Extract and Check for previously processed sessions ask for the Heel2Toe the first time in each run, then remember it.

Behind the scenes

Clinic messages are switched on. Email and text-message delivery for clinic messages (new in 9.3) is now running. A text starts with the clinic’s name, then who wrote it (Dr. Ted: …). Texts come from +1 604 670 3011 until our own number is set up, and end “Replies to this number are not read.”Server permissions for therapist accounts, invitations and the Shopify dashboard were updated on 8 October.Server update. The message service runs on the current Node.js version, ahead of the old one’s retirement on 30 October.

Clinics can now talk to their clients. The weekly summary also got better at the moment people are most likely to stop.

Clinics: message your clients

Clinic → Clients has a Message button.

1. Write the message (up to 500 characters).
2. Tick who receives it: one client, several, or All linked clients. The client you have selected is ticked already.
3. Press Send.

How each client receives it:

In the app. A New message from your clinic card appears on their Home screen, and every message is kept under My Clinic → Messages from your clinic.By email, always, at the email address they linked with.By text message, when their client profile has a mobile number. The edit screen for a client has a Mobile phone field. Please add a number only with the client’s consent.

Only clients who have accepted your clinic’s link request can be messaged; the others don’t appear in the list. That link is their agreement to hear from the clinic.

You can see what happened to each message. A client’s profile lists every message sent to them, with how it went out, for example Email: sent · Text: sent. If something fails, it says failed rather than staying silent.

After a break: “When will you walk next?”

When more than a week has passed since a client’s last walk, the weekly summary says Welcome back! It’s been 12 days since your last walk. When will you walk next? with three answers: Today, Tomorrow or Pick a day.

Choosing a day shows it on the card (Your next walk: Thu, Oct 8) and switches on the daily reminder, so the plan has something to hold it up. Restarting after a holiday or an illness is when habits most often stop for good; a small plan at that moment makes the restart much more likely.

A new week, not “welcome back”

A client who walked on Sunday used to be greeted on Monday morning with Welcome back! Let’s get back on track, as if they had been away. Now, when there have been no walks yet this week but there was one recently, the card says New week — a fresh start. Your goal: 5 walks. (or New month in the first week of a month).

A release about keeping people walking, and about feedback people can trust.

A weekly goal, and a run to keep going

The Weekly Summary on the client’s Home screen shows a goal: 3 of 5 walks this week, with a bar that turns green when the goal is reached. Below it, a client who keeps it up sees 4 weeks in a row at your goal.

The client sets it. The pencil beside the goal opens Walks per week; any number from 1 to 14. It starts at 5.The run counts weeks, not days. One missed day doesn’t break it, and the current week only counts once the goal is reached, so a run that met last week’s goal is still alive on Monday morning.A longer view. Below the weekly card, a BEST Score card shows the latest Walk-BEST, its trend and the last 12 weeks at a glance. Walk-BEST History opens the detail.

Uploading what you just walked is one press

After Extract, the sessions that are not in the cloud yet are ticked already, so Upload Selected sends exactly what was just walked. Sessions already uploaded, too short to upload, or flagged as possibly damaged or duplicated are left unticked for you to look at. If the app cannot check what is already uploaded (for example, offline), nothing is ticked. The tick box at the top of the list still selects or clears everything.

Clinics: see who has gone quiet

In Clinic → Clients, each client’s last session has a coloured dot: green walked in the last 7 days, orange 8–14 days ago, red more than 14 days ago, grey never. Click the Last Session heading to sort by it: the first click puts the clients who have gone quiet longest at the top. On a phone or in card view, the Least recent first chip does the same.

The daily reminder

It starts switched on on the Get Started card that new clients see, unless the client has already chosen. The phone or tablet still asks permission first, and one tap turns it off.It fires when it should. On Windows and macOS it was skipped every day you opened Home before the reminder time; now it is skipped only when today’s walk has been uploaded. On phones and tablets it now stays quiet on a day you have already walked, and comes back the next day.It speaks your language, as does the New analytics data available notice.

Fall risk stays hidden when it is switched off

A clinician can switch Risk of Fall off for a client. Two places ignored that setting: the weekly summary could still say “Your fall risk is elevated…”, and Weekly Details still showed a Fall Risk %. Both now follow it. Clinic and PhysioBiometrics views always show fall risk.

The colours mean the same thing everywhere

A Walk-BEST of 72 was green on one screen and orange on another. One set of bands now applies everywhere, including the wording of the weekly insight:

The weekly summary reads correctly after a break

With no sessions yet this week, Home shows your last active week. Its summary used to begin “4 sessions this week — good consistency!” about that earlier week. It now begins with what is true today, then gives that week’s results.

Download your device loan history

Clinic → Heel2Toe Devices → loan history has a Download CSV button beside Refresh. It saves the loans you are looking at (the All / Active / Returned / Overdue filter applies) as a spreadsheet that opens directly in Excel, on every platform: serial number, device ID, who it is loaned to, loaned date, expected return, returned date, status, return condition and notes. Accented names come through correctly, and the column headings are always in English so a spreadsheet built on the file keeps working.

SuperUser tab: the session menu works again

PhysioBiometrics staff only. In 9.0, six of the nine entries in a session row’s ☰ menu (Compare, Gait Quality, Cadence, Fatigue, Exercises and Risk of Fall) opened a page reading ERROR; they now open the same screens as the Analytics tab. Edit now edits the selected user’s session. Delete said Session deleted successfully but deleted nothing; it now removes the selected user’s session. Sessions “deleted” from that tab on 9.0 are still there.

The theme is the app asking you less. Version 8.4 was never released on its own; everything it contained is part of 9.0.

The app finds your Heel2Toe by itself

Extract no longer asks where the device is. On Windows and macOS, press Extract Heel2Toe data and the app finds the Heel2Toe itself, and names the drive it found. It recognises a Heel2Toe by what is on it, not its drive letter, so a backup folder or a memory stick is never mistaken for the device.

More than one Heel2Toe connected? The app asks which one, listing each by its client, clinic and number of sessions.Not the one you meant? Every question keeps a Choose a folder instead… way out.Nothing on the device? The app says No sessions found and offers to look somewhere else.

On phones and tablets the folder prompt stays, once, the first time: Android and iOS require your permission before any app can read removable storage.

Configure shows what your device is actually set to

Opening Configure Heel2Toe reads the settings off the docked device, instead of showing the last settings you saved. Pressing Read from Heel2Toe is no longer needed (the button is still there). A status line says which of four situations you are in:

If you have started editing, docking a device will not overwrite what you were doing.

A warning before a session is recorded in the wrong mode

If a unit is not set up for walking, a participant can walk for six minutes and the session comes back with no steps in it. The app now reads what the docked unit is set to: Configure Heel2Toe shows a Device mode line, or a yellow warning with Write Settings to Heel2Toe to switch it back, and a warning beside Extract takes you straight to the screen that fixes it. Nothing appears when the device is set correctly.

Also in 9.0

A sessions list with room to be read. A toggle above the table hides the profile and storage cards and gives their height to the list. Rows are a little tighter on desktop.The banner tells you where you are. The top bar names the clinic and product, for example Mount Sinai · Heel2Toe. The version, build and release date moved to ⓘ About, with a Copy button.Settings are never written beyond what your device can read. The app checks the firmware before writing and never sends more settings than the device can hold. Walking settings are written in full on every firmware version we support.Magnetometer calibration on firmware 12.2.3 or newer, from Configure Heel2Toe.GoHand, by invitation. A second use of the same sensor, for hand and arm movement, enabled per account. Accounts without it see no sign of it.No more freezes when a USB device misbehaves. We’re sorry to anyone whose Docking Station stopped responding and had to be closed. Unplugging a Heel2Toe, or one unresponsive USB hub anywhere on the computer, could freeze the app or stop it finding the device. Detection now runs in the background with time limits, and the app reconnects on its own.Extract no longer stalls on a drive that is disappearing.

Notes

Updated guides. How to Upload Your Heel2Toe Data and How to Change Your Heel2Toe Settings have been rewritten for 9.4 (the steps the app now does for you are gone). There are also new user guides for clinic admins, therapists and clients.Firmware. Walking works on all current customer firmware. The full settings range and magnetometer calibration need firmware 12.2.3 or newer; older devices keep working with the settings that fit them.Units. Heel strike, push-off and foot swing are rotation speeds in degrees per second (°/s).Clinic messages are one-way. A client who replies to the email or text won’t reach the clinic through the app; add call us on … to a message if you’d like replies.“Seen” is per device. A message read on a client’s phone shows as new on their computer until they open it there too.Reminders on Windows and macOS need the app to be running.Reporting a problem. Press ⓘ About → Copy and paste the line into your message.

Managing device storage

Reclaim device space, safely

Over time the Heel2Toe fills with recordings, which makes each transfer slower. You can now clear out recordings that are already safely uploaded — without ever risking your data.

See what’s on the device. A Device storage card next to Extract shows which sessions are already uploaded (safe to clear) vs. new, with date, client, and size — and checks itself automatically as soon as it appears.
Choose what to clear with tick-boxes or Select all, and optionally back up first to another drive or folder.
Only confirmed-uploaded recordings are removed. Anything not yet in the cloud is always kept — if there’s any doubt, nothing is deleted.
Make it automatic. Opt in to auto-reclaim after every transfer (Settings → Auto-reclaim device space).
Cross-client awareness. Sessions processed under a different client are flagged by name so nothing is cleared by surprise.

Open sessions from a folder or zip — no device needed

You no longer need the Heel2Toe plugged in to review sessions. Load sessions from folder… and from zip… open recordings from a card reader, a backup folder, or a .zip on another disk. Loaded sessions can be reviewed and uploaded (they’re read-only; clearing space stays tied to the live device).

A clearer sessions list

Transfer estimate. The Extract progress bar shows how much is left and an estimated time remaining, based on the actual speed so far.
Power-off sessions are no longer flagged as errors. A session ended with Power-Off shows as a yellow warning (usable but incomplete) rather than red “corrupt data,” with a legend explaining it.
Wrong-date sessions are flagged. If the device clock was reset after losing power, affected rows carry a marker — the recording is fine, but the date should be corrected before uploading.
The list fills the screen with a clear Scroll for more indicator, tidier columns, and status icons.
Readable on every screen — the storage card and session table stay high-contrast and fit narrow phones without clipping.

A heads-up when more than one device is connected

If two Heel2Toes are plugged in at once, the app can only work with one — and it isn’t always obvious which. The extract screen now shows a clear warning, asking you to unplug the extras and reconnect only the device you intend to use. The warning clears on its own once the extra device is removed.

Tuning and profiles

Finer Good Step Threshold. Adjusts in steps of 25 instead of 50, with the range extended down to −400 — more precise tuning across a wider range of walking abilities (always within the firmware’s supported range).
Session length respects your device’s limit. The app caps length to what your connected device’s firmware supports, so a value you enter behaves as expected. On the latest firmware the range is larger.
Auto Foot Detect, on by default. No longer “experimental” — a standard option, on by default on supported devices.
View-only profiles. A profile can be set to view-only — the person sees their details but can’t change them, useful when a clinic manages a client’s information.

For clinics

Risk of Fall is now optional for clients. Clinics can hide it from an individual client’s view; clinic and superuser views always show it.
Devices listed by serial number in natural numeric order, instead of an arbitrary order.
Option to hide the clinic invitation. The “Want to become a clinic?” home-screen message can be turned off for accounts that don’t need it.
Better diagnostics. The diagnostics screen surfaces the device’s raw connection output, making it faster to troubleshoot a device that won’t connect.

Fixes & improvements

Reading settings from the device is more reliable — unrecognized entries are skipped and the rest load normally.
The SD-card storage card recovers on its own when storage takes a moment to appear — no need to unplug and reconnect.
Steadier device connection — cleaner connection probes and better multi-device detection keep the device responsive during longer sessions.
A cleaner Windows app name — window title, taskbar, and file details now read Heel2Toe Docking Station.
General interface polish across the clinic, analytics, and dashboard screens.