ATU743 – Touchpoint Solution with Vicki Mayo

Hi, this is Vicki Mayo, and I’m the CEO and Founder of The TouchPoint Solution, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 743 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on August 22nd, 2025.

On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome Vicki Mayo, Founder and CEO of The TouchPoint Solution, and she is here to talk about TouchPoints and how they are able to help individuals with stress, anxiety, and other needs. We also welcome back BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning. Don’t forget listeners, we always love to hear from you. If you’ve got a suggestion for a guest, a comment, a question or anything, please reach out. You can send us an email at Tech@EastersealsCrossroads.org, or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124.

Now today, folks, we’re going to start off with a little blast from the past.

You may notice that my voice is slightly different as I am your new host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 378 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on August 24th, 2018.

So as you heard folks, that was from August 24th of 2018, which also just happened to be the very first show that I hosted solo. Now, of course, our guest that day was Wade Wingler, who hosted this show for the 377 shows prior to that. But I did just want to kind of do a little flashback there, because as this show comes out on August 22nd, on August 24th, we’ll mark seven years of me hosting this show, coming out every single Friday during that time. Also, during this month marks 14 years that I have been here at Easterseals Crossroads, so a very long time doing this.

And I must admit, it is an absolute, just pleasure and such an honor to get to come to you every single week. During this time, I’ve got to talk to so many just amazing folks, and it never ceases to amaze me the reasons behind why they create some of the things that they create, and just the amazing technology that can come out. I’m sure some of the folks we’ve interviewed, I’m sure those devices have changed or melded or maybe aren’t even around any longer, maybe even bought up by other ones, or maybe some of those pieces and parts are used in some other tools. But just watching technology grow and seeing all this amazing stuff, and it is just such an honor to get to talk to folks, find out about the amazing assistive and accessible technology that they create.

I must admit, whenever I first started doing this show, I think it was more of a stopgap, maybe something I would do for a little while to keep it up and going, and that’s been seven years. So, just a huge thanks to all of you for listening, for our amazing guests for coming on, to Nicole for assisting with scheduling our guests, with all the logistics that goes behind that. And a big thanks to Wade Wingler for having that faith in me and really letting me take over this show. After seven years, I must admit, I still do not see myself in any way, shape, or form as a podcaster, even though I guess I do the interviews, I do the editing, I do the posting, I do all the putting together. It still just feels like it’s part of the job, and I suppose that it really is.

But hopefully listeners, you do find some worth in it. Hopefully you’re able to learn about some really cool assistive technology that can help you, your friends, your family, those you work with, or other folks that you might encounter along the way, but just a huge, huge, huge thank you to everyone out there who’s listening. Thanks for listening for the past seven years. Hope to be doing this for at least that much longer, but I guess cheers. Here’s to seven years, which I think’s about 365 episodes so far and counting, so we will just keep it up and keep it going. And again, thank you so much for listening, folks. Whether this is your first show or your 743rd, we really appreciate you coming along for the ride, and can’t wait to see where the show can go in the next seven years.

Next up on the show, listeners, please join me in welcoming back BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with Bridging Apps, and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called VDScan. Voice Dream Scanner is an iOS app that can take pictures and perform optical character recognition, or OCR, on those images. After doing this, the text can be read, discarded, or saved. This app comes from the same developer who made the fantastic Voice Dream Reader. While it is not necessary to own Reader to use Scanner, they work extremely well together. You can even scan directly from Reader using Scanner.

VDScan is a fantastic tool for a variety of users who can benefit from using high-quality OCR to have text read out loud. Older adults, users with visual impairments, dyslexia, intellectual disabilities, developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, and anyone who struggles with the written word can benefit from using this app at home, at work, or in the community. This app was trialed with an older adult with a visual impairment who needed to have mail, medicine labels, and recipes read out loud in order to complete everyday tasks. The user appreciated the ease of use and the fact that an internet connection was not required to use the app. VDScan is currently available for only iOS devices, and it is a one-time fee of $14.99 to download. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Listeners’ stress, let’s not lie, it affects us all in one way or another. Well, our guest today is Vicki Mayo, Founder and CEO of The TouchPoint Solution, and she’s here to tell us how TouchPoints can help to reduce stress and anxiety, and we are really excited to learn all about it. Vicki, welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you, Josh. I’m excited to be here today.

I am really excited to learn all about the technology, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Certainly. Well, I’m based out of Arizona and I’m a business owner. I like to call myself an entrepreneur, I think, but most importantly, first and foremost, I’m also a mom and I have four kids.

Awesome. I have four kids as well, so stress and anxiety is definitely something that I know we can probably both share in common, in there. I guess, on to the tech. I guess just start us off at the beginning. Where did the idea for TouchPoints and The TouchPoint solution come from?

Yeah, thank you. And I always say it to all my moms out there, props to you all, because this, I think, is one of the hardest jobs on the planet, and TouchPoint was actually born out of a mom experience. I mentioned four kids. My youngest is a girl, three boys and one girl, and she, when she was four years old, three to four years old, was really struggling with night terrors. And I don’t know, as a parent, if you’ve ever witnessed your kid with night terrors, it’s like a really bad dream where they’re screaming and kicking that they can’t get out of, and it was so perplexing that I kept asking different people.

One day on a call with one of my friends, I said, “I don’t know what to do about these night terrors.” Well, she happened to be a neuropsychologist, and she said, “Well, night terrors are the result of unprocessed stress.” Well, my little daughter, who’s highly gifted, was really struggling with just the basic shifts from going from math to English at school, and just from playground to indoor, just all of those things, and it was coming out in night terrors. So, being the avid mom that I am, I researched unprocessed stress, which is essentially PTSD, and I said, “Well, what’s the therapy for PTSD?” And it turns out it’s a type of therapy called EMDR. Now, Josh, are you familiar with EMDR?

I am not.

Okay, so think about, it’s EMDR, it’s for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. So you’ve heard of REM sleep, like that really good deep sleep at night where your eyes are moving?

Mm-hmm, yes.

Yep. So when you’re doing EMDR therapy, the easiest way to explain it is that you’re awake, but you look at flashing lights, and you put yourself in that same state of sleep, like that you’re asleep. But while you’re moving your eyes around, and it’s almost like being in REM sleep, they ask you to think about those traumatic things that are happening, and essentially you rewire the neural pathways of your brain.

This technology has been around for about 50 years, and it’s what they use for our soldiers out in the battlefield. It’s been very heavily used, and the World Health Organization said it’s the number one treatment for PTSD. So you know, I’m that tiger mom, so I research it and I go, “Okay, what do I do? How do I give this to my daughter?” Well, for those that are blind, they have taken the flashing lights and turned it into tactile vibrations. So, I put those tactile vibrations in my daughter’s hands at night during her night terrors, and Josh, within 30 seconds, her night terrors stopped. She woke up the next morning the happiest little kid in the world, and I was dumbfounded.

Oh, my gosh. I bet that makes such a huge difference. That’s absolutely amazing. I love when things get born out of necessity. So, I guess we know what they do, but tell us, what are TouchPoints?

Right, right, so what I did was that vibration that I put in my daughter’s hands, it was so impactful. It was so impactful that I was running an agency for the government of Arizona, and I left that state agency because I felt that this technology was so powerful, I wanted to put it in the hands of everyone. So what I did was I studied those waveforms, and we took that bilateral haptic stimulation, so we call it BLAST, bilateral alternating stimulation in the tactile format, and we embedded it in small wearable devices about the size of a face of an Apple Watch. And those vibrations, if you wear them in your hands or put them in your tank top straps, your pockets, your socks, your wrists, when you have that bilateral stimulation on you, it immediately takes you out of your body’s fight or flight mechanism.

The story I told about my daughter, that’s basically what we were doing. We were allowing her to get out of her fight-or-flight. She was so stressed out about the simple shifts throughout the day. We were taking her out of that system, letting her be in her parasympathetic nervous system, and that allows her just to be rational and logical about things, and that, Josh, is the magic.

I mean, these days, so many of us are stressed and anxious about things that we know we really logically don’t need to be stressed out about, but our fight-or-flight mechanism is so overwhelming. I mean, that thing was made millions of years ago so we could run from saber-toothed tigers. It’s not needed the same way today. And unfortunately, unless you do some sort of really heavy meditation practice every day, or something to really strengthen that part of your brain, your fight-or-flight’s going to kick in 100 times a day when you don’t need it to. So, TouchPoints are that secret tool that you can use discreetly anytime of the day, anywhere, to help you reduce stress and anxiety.

That’s so awesome. And let’s say I need to wear the TouchPoints. Is there a certain amount of time I need to wear them to kind of have the effect, or is it more of a personal preference, or what meets the need of that time?

That’s a great question. A little bit of both, so we suggest if you tend to just be an overly anxious or stressed-out person, I mean, the best thing to do is put them on for 15 minutes in the morning while you drink your coffee or you brush your teeth, and it literally tones down your nervous system for the entire day. If you have something stressful, like Josh, maybe you get nervous when you do a podcast, if you did, you could put them on at the start of your podcast and even during your podcast discreetly, and no one would know, and it would keep you from getting overly anxious.

Now, on our website, we have an encyclopedia of uses, and there’s over 200 different quote, unquote, “recipe cards” that show you how you can wear them, where you could place them, which setting to put them on. So, it’s very, very customizable, but without a fail, put them on for 15 minutes in the morning and you’ll start your day really well, and put them on for 15 minutes before you go to bed and you’ll have the best night’s sleep of your life.

Oh, that’s so cool. And I love that you said you have the recipe cards, because I don’t know, sometimes, especially with something new, it almost adds to the stress of, am I going to use it wrong? Am I using it the right kind of way? So, I love that you actually have those already made up for folks to be able to help them out and take, I guess, some of the stress off of that part as well.

Exactly.

And then, Vicki, I know there’s many different ways that I can wear them and some different attachments, I guess, is the best word that I can come up with. Can you describe those to me a little bit and how they’re different?

Yup, absolutely. The base tokens, those little Apple Watch sort of faces, you can hold them in your hands, which a lot of people say are the best. But we had a lot of people that said, “I want to clip them to my clothing,” so we have a TouchPoint Essentials kit, which just, it’s the same base technology, but it includes clips. A lot of people, especially children or those with special needs, want to wear them on their wrists, and so we have wristbands. And then the last version is our sleep version, and that has a zippered sweatband, so you just open the little zipper and drop them into the sweatband, and you can pull them onto your ankles, you can pull them onto your wrists or your biceps, just various locations, again, based off of the outcome that you wanted to achieve.

Nice. And since you say “bilateral,” I’m guessing you need kind of one on one side, one on the other. Is that correct?

Exactly, yes. In order for it to work, you have to put one on either side of your body. So, when you buy a kit, it always comes with a set of two, plus the charging cables, because these devices are rechargeable. My entire mission was, I want to make this affordable and accessible, and so for the same cost of going to a therapist one time, you can have access to this technology that you can use anytime, anywhere.

About how long do they usually last on a charge?

Most people use them in sessions, 15 minutes to an hour, depending on what you’re wanting to overcome. But the devices, once they’re charged, they have about four hours of vibration time.

Oh, awesome. So definitely if you took them with you during the day, it should definitely last you all day, because like you say, doing it in sessions.

Oh, for sure.

Not really just using them continuously, all day long.

Right. I use them. I just throw them in my purse and they’re usually good for a week, and I charge them every weekend. I will say, there is one interesting use case where you can leave them on all the time, and I feel like given the audience, this might be helpful for them.

We’ve had a lot of research study done, and I’ll tell you a fun story. The very first time that I really saw TouchPoints being used outside of my daughter, my use case, it was a high-functioning individual that was basically twice exceptional, but had high-functioning autism, and he was maybe 16 years old. And I said, “Can I put these on you, Jacob?” And so I put the wristbands on his arms, turned them on, and his mom was sitting across from him, and he would stim. And as soon as the devices went on, he just stopped stimming, and he looked up and he looked his mom in the face, and she just started crying, and she said, “He’s never made eye contact with me. This is incredible.”

What was so interesting is I asked Jacob, “Do you feel any different?” And he said, “No, it’s the same. These aren’t doing anything for me.” But his teachers, everyone around him, was just blown away by how much better he was able to interact with his peers and just continue to be super high-functioning. When you have autism, a lot of people will buy two sets, and they’ll wear them all day at school. So, we have about maybe 25 gifted academies, gifted and autistic schools and academies across the country in the United States, and they keep several sets of TouchPoints on hand at all times for the students to wear all day.

No, that’s great, because I know sometimes just that regulation, that kind of anxiety and stress regulation, can be just a game changer on just being able to focus, being able to be present for folks, of course, with autism and really just anybody. So I can see how that would be a great tool, and that’s awesome. That’s really great, especially since I always love it too, not just when something comes from necessity, but that wasn’t really the target audience at first.

No.

Although stress and anxiety definitely affect us all, to some, it’s just a much bigger barrier, so I love that story.

Yup. Sensory processing disorder, it’s incredible game changer.

Oh, it definitely is. You just gave me one really good one, but could you tell me another story about someone’s success using TouchPoints?

Oh, my gosh, we have so many, Josh. Every day we get people that are [inaudible 00:18:31] us. Oh, here’s an interesting one. I just recently had a fire chief, no, I’m sorry, a police chief come to me, and he had to testify in court against a really, really bad guy, and he had such bad PTSD and trauma because this bad person had actually killed his partner. And so, he was on the witness stand and he was so afraid he was going to go into a panic attack, and he used the TouchPoints all during when he was on trial and through the entire trial and on the witness stand. And he said, “If it hadn’t been for my TouchPoints, I wouldn’t have gotten through it.”

We’ve got, like I mentioned, I have tons and tons of kids. I had just recently a very sweet younger child, I think he’s probably eight or nine years old, kept running out of the classroom. He and his family had just moved, and the teacher kept putting the kid on step and reprimanding him, and the kid just kept running away, out of the classroom, and it was very disruptive. He put TouchPoints on, the teacher gave it to him, and again, it was just hyperactive fight-or-flight. As soon as he had those on and he was literally taking flight, he was able to settle down. And again, teachers, parents, principal all called saying, “This is incredible. You need to know about it.”

Yeah, I mean, story after story. We had a quadriplegic that had a lot of anxiety, and Christian started using TouchPoints and said it was really game changing, especially because he was often in so much pain and uncomfortable, he had a hard time sleeping, and he said TouchPoints were the game changer for him.

That’s so cool. Just so many different uses, so many different needs. I mean, I guess we all process stress and anxiety and all those things so differently, so just so, so many different needs. Vicki, how can our listeners find out more, access TouchPoints, and then also find access to those recipes and everything else?

Absolutely. Well, TouchPoint, when we started launching the product, again, my goal, affordable, accessible for everyone, so I made it into a direct-to-consumer product, although a lot of medical professionals will recommend you to use them before they give you any type of medication. But you can go to our website, you can do ilovetouchpoint.com, and it’ll redirect you to thetouchpointsolution.com. But ilovetouchpoint is an easy URL to remember, and users can get on the website. All the research and studies are listed there. I think we have over 10 clinical studies, and probably 25 or 30 published papers at this point about the technology. You can also find the encyclopedia of uses with all those recipe cards I mentioned.

And Josh, I also wanted to make sure that we extended something special to the folks that are listening to the podcast today, so we are offering 15% off each set using the code ASSIST, the name of your podcast, A-S-S-I-S-T. And when they go to check out, they can just enter ASSIST into the discount code field for that 15% off. And so, our sets are generally around $220, so we’re happy to be able to extend that to your folks.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We’ll put links to that all down in the show notes. Vicki, we kind of skipped over and didn’t even talk. Could you tell us about some of the clinical trials and just what was found during them, or how they went?

Yes. It’s really interesting. We looked at a few different ways to measure stress. So, when people are stressed, one of the biggest things, and even right now as you’re listening to this podcast, just think of something stressful, and just really think about it, and you can just rate that stressing on a scale of zero to 10. And then while you’re thinking about it, notice your body, and you’ll find that you’re either holding your breath or maybe your shoulders tensed up or you might feel a headache coming on. Your stomach might be hurting. What so many of us don’t realize is that stress and anxiety impacts our physical body. And one of the ways we measured the effectiveness of TouchPoints was we said, “How quickly can we reduce your stress? And not only how you think about your stress, but your physical body?”

So, if you were thinking of something stressful and you said, “Maybe my stressful thing’s an eight, and I feel it in my stomach and I have this stomach pain and it’s like an eight,” we would give you TouchPoints and within 30 seconds of holding them, there’d be a 70% reduction in your stress. And that would be, we would take that baseline eight number for how you’re feeling about stress and that physical sensation, and reduce it by 70% in just 30 seconds. And we have a number of trials and things published on that.

But I know that there’s naysayers out there that would say things like, “Well, that doesn’t really prove anything, because it could be the placebo effect.” So, we actually went and did cortisol testing as well. We took a group of folks. We had them all do something stressful. It’s called the Trier Social Stress Test. And then we had a group that was a placebo, we had a group that was using TouchPoints, and this was actually a triple blind placebo-controlled study using cortisol. And again, the same thing. When we did the cortisol pulls, not only for the folks that use TouchPoints, not only did they do something stressful and their cortisol level didn’t rise during the stressful thing, but as you may know, cortisol tends to spike about 20 minutes after you do something stressful. We measured cortisol before, during, and 20 minutes after, and the folks that used TouchPoints, their cortisol levels dropped below the baseline after the stressful event, 20 minutes later, which is unheard of. There’s nothing that can do that. So, we studied it that way.

And then I thought, “For those real hardcore skeptics, I’m going to do one more.” We also looked at your brain waves, and so there’s a couple different types of brain waves, but at a high level, there’s beta and theta and delta. So we actually put these brain wave caps on people, and we had them think of stressful things and create that excess beta energy in their brain. We gave them TouchPoints, and the same thing. Within two minutes, not only did all of the beta waves disappear, that’s what gives you stress and anxiety, but within two minutes, they started having the same amount of theta, which is what you make when you’re meditating. So, it’s the same amount of effects of 20 minutes of meditation you would get within two minutes of using TouchPoints. So, I proved our technology using basically three different biomarkers.

Nice. And I got to admit, just the fact that it worked for your daughter in her time of need is probably all the proof you needed as a mom, but I love that you went a little bit further and were able to clinically prove that it does work for folks, so that is absolutely, absolutely awesome. Well, Vicki, thank you so much for coming on here today, for telling us about TouchPoints and just all the great things that they’re able to do to help folks, oh, just manage anxiety. Like you said, we’re not running from saber-tooth tigers anymore, but it doesn’t mean that those instincts aren’t still there. So, I love that you made a solution to be able to help so many folks with dealing and managing their stress, their anxiety, and their needs.

Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you for letting me come on and share this game changing technology. It’s definitely something I’m grateful to have been able to be involved with and to bring to the people.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, send us an email at Tech@Eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter, @INDATAproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.