Microsoft alums restore independence for disabled people through tech

AlumniHERO award winners Bill Weis and John Hollcraft put skills they learned at Microsoft to work with their nonprofit Limited Mobility Solutions

PHOTO COURTESY OF BILL WEIS
Bill Weis, left, co-founded Limited Mobility Solutions. His first project was helping Robbie Ivey gain more independence via voice-enabled technology.

By Becky Monk

Bill Weis and his wife, Deb, were volunteering with the Muscular Dystrophy Association when they learned of Robbie Ivey, an 18-year-old whose independence had been stripped away by Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

Bill met Robbie and his mom, Carrie, and learned that Robbie could move his thumb on his right hand, and with that kind of limited mobility, he wasn’t able to easily activate his mechanical bed. The bed needed to change positions often to relieve pressure points and make Robbie more comfortable. For nearly everything, he was completely dependent on Carrie, from adjusting the bed to changing television channels to turning off his lights when he was ready to go to sleep.

Following a rich and productive career in the tech industry, including 15 years at Microsoft, Bill knew that technology could help solve the problems of people in his community like Robbie who were living with disabilities. He just needed to find the right tech solutions.

In Robbie’s case the solution was designing a voice-activated controller for his bed then addressing other needs by adapting voice activated technologies already on the market.

“That’s where things started,” Bill recalled. “I listened to all of the comments that (Carrie) made about the challenges of day-to-day life and that just opened up my eyes to the much bigger daily need.”

Other people heard what Bill had done and asked for help. His passion projects included assisting a man with advanced-stage ALS learn how to use an eye gaze machine to speak and automating a mechanical bed for a quadriplegic Navy veteran who could only adjust his bed using his teeth.

When a woman from Minnesota reached out for help with a device that could open doors for her, Bill needed to develop something that was beyond his skill set.

That’s when he picked up the phone and called his long-time friend and fellow Microsoft alumnus John Hollcraft. Bill and John had met when they both worked at Digital Equipment. Bill had gone to work for Microsoft and eventually recruited the software developer to come work for Microsoft.

“We were in different roles, a thousand miles apart, but we stayed in contact,” Bill said. The long-time friends kept in contact even after they both retired. “John also was of the same mindset that our retirement life is really about helping others. John went and developed the Amazon skill, and then added manageability features making our solutions much more professional looking.”

That’s when Limited Mobility Solutions, the nonprofit that the duo runs with Bill’s wife Deb, was born. Bill and Deb work from their home in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula and collaborate with John via Microsoft Teams who’s at his home in Ocala, Florida when he’s not traveling.

To date, mostly using their own financial resources, they’ve helped more than 30 individuals hacking solutions by using existing or adapting existing technology and even developing something they need to get the job done.

“The first three or four projects were among the 43 neuromuscular diseases that are under the umbrella of muscular dystrophy,” Bill said. “Then we were getting requests from people with Multiple Sclerosis. Then we were getting requests from some of our wounded warriors, and as well as people that were in a vehicle accident. One lady had a virus that went bad, and she went from being completely fine to being a quadriplegic. We've helped some people with cerebral palsy, we're even seeing some elderly people now that just have arthritis so bad, they can't really control their bed anymore, their adjustable bed.”

Bill’s research into the number of people in the U.S. suffering with just the types of debilitating diseases that he and John have helped so far exceeds 2 million.

“A lot of people are suffering more than they should needlessly, because there's just a lack of awareness about what technology can do to help them,” Bill said.

Bill said he and John plan to use their grant from the Microsoft Alumni Network’s 2019 AlumniHERO award to do just that. Help a lot more people.

“There's really a couple of priorities that we have, one is, continue doing what we're doing with directly helping as many as we can by creating bed controllers and door controllers that are voice activated, which require some cloud services to support them,” he said. “Currently, we're paying $500 a month just to support the bed controllers and door controllers that are out there. Part of what that award will go towards is helping pay for some of these cloud services that we need to pay every month. We can also use that for building additional products. It's roughly 15.”

Bill said that helping people with the things he’s learned through his career and having an impact on someone else’s life in these ways has been profound.

“I think everybody wants to do good things for other people,” he said. “For me personally, to look at the technical skills that I developed in my working career, the business skills that my wife developed as a CEO of a manufacturing company and the technical skills John developed as a software development manager, you combine all of those together, and completely change somebody else's life. Man, it is just the greatest feeling in the world.”

To read more about Bill and his first project with Robbie: Go here.

How alumni can act with Bill and John: “One area that we are challenged at times is when it comes time to implement even commercially available products. It would be helpful if there was someone in that local geography that knew something about Amazon Echo or Google Home or Logitech Harmony Hub or any of those kinds of commercially available devices," Bill said. “Having alumni that are distributed across the U.S. that have some technical skills to help with implementation would be great.”