Edmonds-based Forward Mobility wins $50,000 grant

Published 1:00 pm Friday, November 20, 2009

Edmonds-based Forward Mobility is starting production on its latest mobility device after winning a national entrepreneurship competition last week.

The freedom leg, a prosthetic-style device that allows someone with a leg injury to walk without using their arms, should be on the market soon, said Forward Mobility President Joel Smith.

Smith and his wife, Patty Steele-Smith, started Forward Mobility a year ago. The three-person company won $50,000 in development grants last week from Alibaba.com, an online business-to-business sales platform.

View an ABC segment on the competition here.

Th win means Forward Mobility is moving to production with the freedom leg, its third product released this year.

“I’m hoping we’ll receive the first products, with a little luck, within the next 60 days,” Smith said.

You can see a demonstration of the freedom leg here, from earlier in the competition.

Publicity surrounding the competition brought a storm of interest in Smith’s mobility inventions. In the last month, Forward Mobility received a deluge of requests from companies in 20 countries about distributing the freedom leg after production.

The freedom leg is the result of several earlier prototypes, which Smith started working on when his wife suffered a knee injury earlier this year.

“You have to have unbelievable persistence,” he said. “What you have to understand is, whether it’s a product or a service, the first time you do it, it’s not going to be good enough. You have to do it over and over.”

Read an earlier story I wrote about Forward Mobility here.