Tim Balz
speaker
72 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tim Balz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm doing wonderful. How are you doing?
Let's do it.
Yeah, so myself, I'm a mechanical engineer. I've been working for over 15 years to serve people with disabilities, starting with a nonprofit that I founded. And I'm all about bringing the best of technology to everyone.
Yes. So for me, it all started back in high school where I noticed a student who would pull the recycling behind his manual wheelchair. And one day I saw that the recycling bin was too heavy for him. So he had to have someone basically come rescue him and wheel him back to class. And, you know, I asked, you know, why didn't he also have a power wheelchair as well?
And his teacher told me that it was denied because he can move like 100 yards under his own strength. That didn't feel right. And so I traded a moped for a wheelchair on Craigslist. I tripped it out for him. It totally changed his life.
And then I had all these other people coming to me needing wheelchairs as well because their insurance had denied them or because of one reason or another they didn't have insurance. And so since then I've refurbished and given away well over 150 wheelchairs. And that's kind of why I became an engineer. And it's specifically why this population is one that I serve.
Yep. For me now, it's literally a little over 15 years now.
I have great parents that always taught me empathy and that you shouldn't wait for someone to ask for help. If you see a problem and you're able to solve it, then that's what you should do.
Yes, that's really interesting. For me, one, I never had the – I wasn't smart enough to build the nonprofit in a way – people kept coming to me in need, and I just kept refurbishing wheelchairs. It wasn't some grand vision or plan. But as I would work on these wheelchairs, I would see that this technology was so far behind what consumers – without disabilities were seeing in their everyday life.
And so I was like, hey, you know, it's my life's goal to try to bring technology up to speed in this space. So I actually built one of the world's first smart wheelchairs and even gotten to do some work with that where Stephen Hawking endorsed it. And then from there, I was like, great, you know, I've helped them increase the technology.
And then I went to SpaceX so I could learn how do you disrupt really hard to disrupt industry so I could create my own company in the space to try to solve more problems. And that's when we realized, you know, seeding for people with disabilities is something where there is a huge issue that if we didn't solve it, we didn't know that it ever would get solved.
Yeah. So all of our, all of our smart cushion products, uh, like do use AI. What we really start with is what is the problem we can solve and what are the best tools in the world to solve it? And, you know, there's this great new, newer tool and, uh, it's kind of been infused, uh, in the product and, and, uh, in some of our core algorithms even, uh, for how the product responds to your body.
So everyone is used to sitting on these seats that are designed to fit everyone. That's not possible. Someone who weighs 80 pounds is female versus someone who weighs 400 pounds is male. The right cushion support for them is never going to be the same. But we've got to create seating that can accommodate all these different shapes and sizes.
And so when you sit down on our seat and you suddenly start feeling it shift and move and you feel it like, that like, wow, this cushion just suddenly fit itself to me. I don't have to fit myself to a seat. And most people have never experienced that in their life. And so whenever they feel the cushion doing that and adapting to their body, that's your holy smokes wow moment.
Yeah, so what we're doing is we're using, we have these air cells and these air cells we're able to use sensor data to read sort of what's happening with them.
And so we effectively can look at the shape of your body and how you're supported and then infer, and then we have algorithms that use some basic machine learning and AI that actually change the way that we're increasing or decreasing air in each of those bladders based on your unique body. So think about it where without these tools, you couldn't truly have a custom algorithm for everyone.
The fact that, you know, we're able to use machine learning and AI to tune the algorithm to someone's body is one of the ways that we can now truly make a product that fits everyone's individual body rather than being a one size fits all.
Yeah, so there are a couple different ways that our technology kind of manifests depending on the market. For someone who uses a wheelchair, we can see how you carry the load of your body with the back pressure whenever you first sit down. And so that's like we see the pressure on all of our different, you know, our air cells.
And then with that, we can see like, oh, you're putting more on the left, the right, or you're carrying more load. Like more out to your hips or your ischial tuberosities in the middle. And then we can be like, ah, this must be this shape of your body. We adjust and see how that changes, how your load is carried. And that's how we're able to shape to you.
Now, if you're someone who uses a wheelchair, there are certain things we can't scan or know with our sensors. And so that's where there's other inputs for the data. And so there's an application where if you have like a pressure injury in a specific area, you can actually
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