"I started this company because I was tired of waiting for someone else to."

How a Frustrated Amputee Started Inventing the Products He Needed.

Bill is a bilateral amputee. After surviving a 70-foot fall from a Detroit highway construction zone and 60-plus surgeries, he started building the products no one was making for amputees. Every product starts with a problem he or someone in the community has actually lived.

After becoming a bilateral amputee, Bill Hattan ran into a problem every elevated-vacuum prosthetic user knows: the trim line of his socket kept wearing through his suspension sleeves. He was burning through $6,000 a year in replacements. His wife Julie searched online for a solution and found one. They tried it. It was junk.

So Bill — an engineer with a background in intelligent transportation systems — broke down the concept, rebuilt it from scratch, and showed it to his prosthetist Dennis Leal at Hanger. Within weeks, other patients were calling Dennis asking where to buy it. SleevSaver was born.

SleevSaver — the patented adhesive that wraps the socket trim line and gets up to 5X the life from every $300 suspension sleeve — was the first product. It's now distributed by Hanger Clinic, Cascade, and SPS, and it's the foundation Able Motion has grown on top of.

Today, Able Motion is a growing line of practical solutions for amputees. Some are Bill's inventions — including LinerDock, the patented portable liner-drying stand, and Neuro Ease, a copper-infused shrinker sock. Others come through partnerships: VitalFit, the clinical skincare line developed by Skin Resource MD specifically for residual limbs, joined the lineup because the formulas were dead-on for limb loss.