MapHabit: A Breakthrough Tool for Dementia, Autism, and Brain Injury Care

#009 Caring for a loved one with dementia, autism, or a brain injury can be overwhelming. How do you help them stay independent while easing the burden on caregivers?

In this episode of Healthcare Wayfinders, I sit down with Matt Golden, co-founder and CEO of MapHabit, to explore how this innovative visual mapping tool is transforming cognitive care. Inspired by personal experiences with Alzheimer’s and Down syndrome in his own family, Matt left a successful corporate career to create a better way for people facing cognitive challenges.

We dive into:
✅ How MapHabit helps individuals with memory and executive function challenges build independence
✅ The neuroscience behind visual mapping and habit formation
✅ How caregivers and healthcare providers can use MapHabit to provide better support
✅ The impact MapHabit is making for veterans, families, and individuals with neurodiverse conditions

Whether you're a caregiver, healthcare professional, or someone looking for solutions for a loved one, this episode is packed with valuable insights on empowering people to live fuller, more independent lives.

🔗 Resources & Links:
Check out MapHabit
Connect with Matt Golden

Contact the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast

• Email us at podcast@grassrootslabs.com

Special Thanks to:

• Seth Aten who produces the podcast.
• Grassroots Labs for sponsoring the show.

Review us on Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen. 

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Transcript

Caring for a loved one with dementia, autism, or a brain injury can be overwhelming. How do you help them stay independent while easing the burden on caregivers? Enter MapHabit, a groundbreaking platform using visual mapping to create step by step guides daily tasks, empowering these individuals to navigate life with confidence.

In today's episode of the Healthcare Wayfinders, I sit down with Matt Golden, co-founder and CEO of MapHabit to explore how his innovative tool is transforming cognitive care. Matt's personal journey combined with cutting edge neuroscience has led to a powerful solution that's helping families, caregivers, and healthcare providers alike.

We'll dive into the science behind MapHabit, real world success stories, and what's next for this game changing technology. Let's get started. 

Zach Aten: man. Thank you so much for coming on the Healthcare Wayfinders [00:01:00] podcast. Super excited to talk to you about what the great work that y'all are doing at MapHabit. Why don't you Give us just a brief overview of what MapHabit does. And then I want to hear, I want to go back and hear the story about how and why MapHabit came about.

So give us a little intro and then we'll head that direction. 

Matt Golden: Great. Thanks so much for having me, Zach. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Again, my name is Matt Golden and I'm the co-founder, CEO of MapHabit. We help people with dementia, intellectual disabilities, and traumatic brain injuries live out their daily lives by providing visual cues that can help them complete tasks that we all take for granted.

Our technology platform allows any caregiver to easily create and share content that builds or maintains independence and share that content with the entire care team or anyone that's on the MapHabit platform. So to give [00:02:00] you an example of what that actually means is, let's say, my, my daughter is really struggling to brush her teeth on a consistent basis.

And she either forgets to do it at the right time. She fights me tooth and nail to actually get through the tasks and she'll forget certain steps along the way. So what MapHabit allows you to do is build a visual map on creating that doing that task. So visual map can be, using your smartphone in our app taking a picture of that toothbrush.

taking a picture of the toothpaste, taking a picture of putting the toothpaste on the toothbrush, recording a short video of my daughter brushing her own teeth so she can't say that, I can't do it. Look, this is you doing it. And then actually, taking the, washing it off and washing her hands and basically getting through the whole task.

So the whole idea is personalizing these activities of daily living and giving [00:03:00] people a really great daily routine that they can walk through each of these tasks on their own without a, parents or home health worker or anyone coming in and nagging them or doing it for them, which.

Doesn't help, with your independence. So it's really all about empowering someone. So they, feel confident in a dignified way that they can actually get through their daily routines. And we've have a lot of success stories.

Zach Aten: That is super amazing. And, I can totally see how valuable that would be for, somebody that's struggling with. A diagnosis like this and even their family members or caregivers who may not, maybe didn't have a background in it before but still, want to take care of their family member and need some tools.

To do that. Wow, that's just amazing what you guys are doing. Talk, talk to me a little bit about the background of why you guys started this. It feels like it's probably coming out of some personal experience of yours, but I'll let you, you tell us.

Matt Golden: Yeah I was doing [00:04:00] management consulting for a number of years basically configuring financial planning and analysis systems for large fortune 500 companies. I was making good money. It was it was challenging. But at the end of the day, when I was getting up in the morning, I just wasn't excited about it.

And rewind about 20 years ago, my uncle got diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease. And I got to see firsthand, the whole journey that he and my aunts went through. It started with not being able to calculate the tip on the bill. To not remembering the steps in which to get dressed or bathe.

And then, the impact that had on my aunt, who's a family caregiver with no healthcare experience, she was thrown into this, caregiving role, didn't identify as a caregiver, but knew that she really had to drop everything to, to support her husband who, really didn't know what was happening and was having a lot of trouble.

So it just, It was a huge burden on her [00:05:00] mental and physical health started deteriorating. And it just it, it was so hard to see that from, from a distance. I wasn't, the primary caregiver. Yeah. And I knew there was a better way. I knew that if my uncle had tools, whether it was, a printout of what to do at various points in the day or, there weren't really as many smartphones back then, but.

But there are now, if he had a list of the steps to complete tasks that he can visually see he could probably have done a lot more on his own. So now fast forward 20 years later my me and my co founder Stuart Zola's a neuroscientist. We met in our neighborhood.

He was walking his dog one day. I always knew that he was in healthcare. I didn't really know exactly what he had done. Started talking with him and, he was fascinated. He had all these great ideas about different ways of, mapping out routines. There's something called mind mapping where you take a central idea and have these like branches of kind of subtopics.

And [00:06:00] we basically built map habit around this concept of having a central theme and mapping it out into step by step. So there's a whole lot of neuroscience behind why that works and why following pictures step by step activates a spared region of the brain that's not. Impacted by neurodiverse conditions that actually stays intact and function and capability for very long into these conditions that you can effectively build muscle memory and do the same steps over and over.

And before you know it, you're not even thinking about it. You've learned this task after having a stroke, after having, moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease. Having a traumatic brain injury where you don't remember your name on a given day or, a child with a pretty severe developmental disability who really has had trouble learning these tasks and routines, if you can visually map them out and create that habit then they end up being able to do it like [00:07:00] much faster than what they would using, the standard of care,

Zach Aten: Wow. That is so cool. It's so cool that you met your co founder in your neighborhood. That's a story right there.

Matt Golden: Some things happen by chance and I was looking for something different. He had already retired twice and he's quite a bit older than I am. And he was like, I'm. I'm not done yet. I've got ideas. I want to continue to push through and really make an impact in the world.

And I was also at that point in my life where, I had a good, I had a really good career. I could have kept going on it. But I really wanted the next chapter to have a little bit more meaning and a little bit more impact. I wanted to pay homage to my late uncle. I want to. Celebrate my cousin who's living with down syndrome and has a lot of behavioral needs and needs basically some of these compensatory tools to say tat on task.

So there's a lot of motivation for doing something different and really trying to. [00:08:00] Innovate in a in a world or a system where there really hasn't been a lot of new developments, especially in behavioral health. And there's just not enough workers. There's not enough, people that can support the growing, numbers of people with autism or down syndrome or, Alzheimer's disease and activating and empowering and educating.

family caregivers so they can be critical thinkers and better support partners and flipping the script where you don't have to do everything for that person. You can set them up with success by personalizing these routines and allowing them to go through it on their own. It was just like the perfect storm where we just, we had to jump in on it.

Zach Aten: Now, I know you guys have been doing this for a few years and you've hit some pretty, significant milestones in that. Can you tell us a little bit about where y'all have come from and where you're at today?

Matt Golden: Yeah. So we early on. Started down by getting clinical research data. So [00:09:00] my, my Stuart, who's a career research scientist with the VA with Emory with a lot of different institutions, he had had a lot of success getting national institutes on aging grants over the years.

And really within the first six months of us starting the company, we decided that was the path for us. Not only is this. A great way to prove your intervention works. You're putting a lot of rigor and science behind it. You're basically standing out from a pretty crowded field sometimes with new technology that ours is evidence based and we have proven it through peer reviewed publications, independent.

statisticians. We've worked with, all sorts of different individuals, from, like I mentioned, kids with Down syndrome through veterans with traumatic brain injuries to, older adults with dementia and really their caregivers who is our primary focus. We basically had a lot of success getting these grants.

Got the first one on the first try. [00:10:00] We always had to resubmit it because, we forgot something that we needed to put in there. But it was through that process of doing clinical research and basically having a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis learning about things that we thought would work that didn't work.

Iterating then on the design and based on the user feedback that we then got to a point where the platform really started to work in a lot of unique ways. And we've been able to get reimbursement for it, both at the state and federal levels. And now we're working with pretty large health systems and health insurance companies to have this covered for, the tens of millions of people that will benefit from it.

Zach Aten: Yeah, that was where I was. One of my next questions was, if I have a parent who's been diagnosed with like early onset Alzheimer's how would I connect with you guys and use your product? Is that something like my doctor needs to prescribe for my parent or how does that work?

How do people find you?

Matt Golden: Yeah, it's a great question. And I'll give you two answers. [00:11:00] One for the older adults with dementia and their caregivers, and then one for some of the more Neurodiverse populations that are covered by Medicaid since those are our two primary kind of groups of populations for the older adults with dementia.

We have a partnership with a health system here in Georgia called WellStar For a limited time, we have folks that are associated with the WellStar system can basically get an MapHabit for free. It includes a coaching one on one coaching.

We'll do a kind of a needs assessment on, what are some of the opportunities for building habits, routines, not only for the individual with dementia to ease their daily routines, but really supporting the family caregiver who, needs dementia education and whatnot.

So it could be through, WellStar, one of our commercial partners. We also are doing still a lot of clinical research where you can be paid to be in one of our research studies and get that same. Six one on one sessions with a dementia expert. You get a tablet, you [00:12:00] get, some compensation and really you get all this great education and tools to improve your quality of life and the independence of the one that you're supporting.

Through some of our commercial partners, but really I think the clinical research angle is would be a great way to, to start utilizing MapHabit. The other route is through what are called Medicaid waivers. A lot of times those with a developmental disability or traumatic brain injury are covered under home and community based services waivers.

And we're covered in about 15 different states right now. Where you can basically contact your support coordinator or case manager, where you have a individual service plan and get MapHabit added. So there's no cost to you. So that's another option is through some of these Medicaid waivers.

Yeah. There's plenty of different ways. We will have a direct to consumer offering in the sometime in 2025. We're still working through all the logistics there. but for now there are many of other options [00:13:00] to be able to utilize MapHabit.

Zach Aten: Okay, thank you for that. I'll be sure to put links in the show notes so that people can find those different options that you were talking about. I've been seeing a lot of people talking in the news, especially about, Athletes with like CTE and who are suffering more and more folks who are suffering with that who play high contact sports.

Is that a population that can benefit, from using MapHabit?

Matt Golden: Yes, for sure. Really anyone needing additional cognitive support, it really doesn't matter if you have a formal diagnosis or not. If you just have trouble concentrating, if you have trouble, Getting through your day without a lot, with a lot of stress and anxiety if you rely on a family member to help you with some of these routines map habit is very basic.

You're sequencing pictures step by step. So all you have to do is follow pictures. You don't have to speak any spoken language. You don't even need to be able to read. You [00:14:00] just. imitate and basically follow the steps on, on, on a visual map. And then after a while, you actually develop this muscle memory by seeing the same pictures and doing the same activity over and over, and you do it without even thinking about it.

So that would pertain to, someone with a CTE or someone with a traumatic brain injury, which we have. Done a lot of work with the veteran community. They struggle with really executive function, which is how do I get through my day and do it in a way that is dignified, but then also remembering the right steps and routines.

So yes, someone with CTE. Someone who's just had a stroke someone with an Alzheimer's diagnosis others with developmental disabilities like autism or ADHD. There's a whole bunch of different types of actual diagnoses where it's covered as a reimbursable service, but really anyone who really needs a help getting through their daily routines would benefit from visually mapping them out.

Zach Aten: [00:15:00] So when it comes to the actual technology, you guys have some kind of a tablet or something like that or an app where You know, a caregiver can map out some type of activity that they want their loved one or whoever it is they're taking care of to be able to follow. Is that kind of the process?

Matt Golden: Yeah. Good question. So when we get a new clients to work with, we'll spend about 45 minutes getting to know them, really understanding what are their needs, what are their abilities, what kind of environment do they live in? Do they live in a house? Do they live in a an apartment senior living, or are they in a, a group home, for example?

Who are the connections in their life? Are, family members involved? Is it a, a home care, home health agent, is it a direct support worker? And also what are, the things that really make them tick, what are their interests and whatnot, all those kind of come together, it's called a psychosocial needs assessment.

And then based on those answers, [00:16:00] we have content that's already. Maybe someone's having trouble brushing their teeth. Maybe they're looking for mindfulness activities to get back to center and tap into their mind, body, and spirit. Maybe they're looking for safe seated stretches that they can do to stimulate blood flow and avoid a fall.

So all those things come out on that initial conversation and then, they'll have these, content that they can use right away to, to help build those habits routines, or they will work with our coaches. And really on the, a biweekly basis for that first two months, we will help them visually map out not the whole day we'll focus on one or two, you don't need to solve world's hunger all at once.

You just need a couple of quick wins. And then really see the power of tapping procedural memory to to basically develop this non conscious learning technique. And then your brain gets rewired into thinking breaking things down into different steps. So that whole task analysis [00:17:00] is something, neurotypical people just do automatically and it works for really anyone.

Yes, you can access it through the app. We have printouts that take basically the same pictures that you would take with your camera and load in through the visual map. We can print those out mail a booklet, can get them laminated. If something, someone's forgetting to always, basically use the soap in the shower or, forgets their steps to brush your teeth or even to make coffee, there's a lot of modalities you can use, but effectively you meet with us for a bit we'll help you better use the platform.

And really after a couple of weeks you're really off on your own and are able to use it through, any iOS or Android device or on paper.

Zach Aten: Very cool. Do you guys provide any support or resources for caregivers that are maybe experiencing, conflict with the person that they're trying to help, whether it's I've just heard stories that sometimes it can be, super difficult for the person that has this [00:18:00] diagnosis who could get frustrated really easily or something like that.

And maybe the caregiver is used to this person. Acting a certain way and now they're acting in a different way that can be hard to deal with sometimes. Do you guys have resources for folks who are experiencing that?

Matt Golden: Yeah. And that's very often with the older adults with dementia community. That's why we do most of the time, focus on the caregiver and help them understand some of the root causes of some of these behaviors to help them. Why is this person, my loved one trying to leave the house every day at one o'clock I can't get them to just, stay at home and they keep fighting me the whole time or when we talk with them, we realized they were a mailman and every day at one o'clock they would go out and that was their job.

So you can basically say, Hey let's go out and let's deliver the mail and you end up just walking around. It reduces that anxiety, but unless you ask those questions, unless you focus on the [00:19:00] caregiver on self care and making sure that they are taking a break and they're getting the respite that they need, it is a lot of kind of coaching and counseling.

And we have, licensed clinical social workers and dementia care experts and even behavioral analysts and occupational therapists that work with some of the families in addition to our, our care navigators as well. Long answer to your question, but yes, it's.

Just about as much about the caregiver or the support partner as it is the person that they're supporting

Zach Aten: We're getting a little bit towards the end of our time. To close it out what do you guys, what's coming up in 2025? Where are you going? What do you guys want to do? How do you want to innovate on even the great things that You're already doing to help people who are dealing with these conditions.

Matt Golden: Yeah, no, thanks for asking. We are Really working a lot with some of our partners and the I mean we have this available in all 50 states with some of our health plan partners with [00:20:00] various rollouts and in a couple of key states like California, New York, Florida Kansas, Georgia also we are building out more of our content library on cognitive engagement and really working on, new types of routines and basically things that work on fine motor, gross motor skill bilateral coordination.

We're having different things like different maps of the month that are, sent out alongside various kind of mood regulation and, fidget toys and whatnot to help out with basically, staying, staying centered and keeping that focus.

We're going to have a direct to consumer offering later next year as well, which, people who aren't necessarily associated with a health system or health plan or we don't have, a Medicaid waiver or are part of an area agency on aging that we partner with can still utilize MapHabit to their benefit.

And also doing more clinical [00:21:00] research, we're doing some work with the Shepard Center here in Atlanta, which will continue through next year. As I mentioned, we have a really cool study with the National Institutes of Health that focuses on caregiver training. It's a six month program where, they get a free tablet.

They get those six coaching sessions. They get access to a whole bunch of content and the ability to visually map out some of their routines that we're really excited about in the new year.

Zach Aten: Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show. Just so appreciate you guys and the great work that you're doing at map habit to really make a difference in people's lives. We're going to get links to all the good stuff that you're doing in the show notes so that people can keep up with what you're doing and access those services as they become available.

Appreciate you and thanks so much and have a good holidays.

Matt Golden: Thanks Zach. You too.