Bill Memberg

 

Founder of Replay For Kids

 

by Natajia Sutton, crew 3

 

 

Imagine if your child had a disability and couldn’t play with regular toys. Well, you are in luck, because Bill Memberg’s organization, Replay For Kids, is solving this problem.       

       

This all started when Bill Memberg saw a newspaper ad seeking someone to adapt toys for kids with disabilities. It was 1989, and he was in graduate school at Case Western Reserve University. He answered the ad, and the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities gave him a box of toys. When he fixed them, they gave him regular toys and asked if he could improve them by adapting them so that kids with disabilities could use them.

 

After adapting toys for 10 years, Memberg formed a nonprofit organization called Replay For Kids. Replay For Kids hosts workshops last two to three hours because they do a lesson that teaches volunteers how to adapt and improve the toys. Last year, they did 54 workshops. They save the toys from all of the workshops for a toy giveaway in December. All of the toys they adapt run on batteries and have some kind of switch that needs to be changed for children who have disabilities. For example, some are communication devices for people who can’t speak where they hit a switch and it plays a prerecorded message. “Knowing that a child who wasn’t able to play with it before is able to play with it now is a good feeling,” Memberg, 51, explained. There are some companies that sell toys that are adapted, but they cost three to five times as much as a regular toy. Because they often have other expenses, some families don’t have enough money to purchase the toys.

 

Memberg studied biomedical engineering in college at the University of Pennsylvania, and he also got a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, too. At his job in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Case Western Reserve University, he also helps people. If you went and broke your neck, the communication from your nerves to your arm wouldn’t work. Sometimes people may recover overtime, but once it’s more than a year from the injury, they will not recover from the injury. To help them, Memberg’s research team made a pacemaker device that can be implanted in the chest with the wires down the arm. Also, the electrodes are implanted in the muscles, and a external antenna talks to the implanted device that tells the muscles to activate.  “I get to do a wide variety of things, from designing the electrodes to testing it and working with patients that use it,” Memberg said. He also has a patent for his electrode that is implanted. If you don’t know, a patent means you made an invention and no one else can copy that without paying you. Now the team is working on a device to help paralyzed patients stand up.

 

Memberg was born in Philadelphia, and he lived there for 25 years. He met his wife in Cleveland, and they have been married for 22 years. His wife also works with kids as a pediatrician. They have a daughter who has down syndrome. “She was born years after I started doing this,” Memberg said. “Through her, I’ve met a lot of other kids who have disabilities.”

 

Replay For Kids is headquartered in Memberg’s house, so they are only able to serve Northeast Ohio. They work with 26 agencies in nine counties in Northeast Ohio. Memberg gets requests around the country for toys, so he is trying to expand and develop through other colleges. For example, he went to Ohio State University to do workshops, and now they are doing they own, so now they are collaborating. Memberg hopes his organization can expand because they are thinking of new ideas for how to improve toys and make them more accessible. “If someone gave us a million dollars, we could have a center where people could come and we could do the workshops at the same place all the time,” he said.