2026-11-18 · Activation Capital — 800 E Leigh St, Richmond, VA
What if you could build a solution to a healthcare challenge without knowing how to code? For more than a decade, Matthew Scott has worked to improve access to fitness and physical activity for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. As an exercise physiologist, educator, and community advocate, he saw firsthand how traditional approaches left barriers that passion and expertise alone could not overcome. Rather than accept those limitations, he decided to build something different. The result is GARDEN, an app prototype designed to make reward-based physical activity more accessible, engaging, and available anywhere, anytime. And here's what makes this story remarkable: Matthew isn't a software developer. He's an exercise physiologist who used artificial intelligence to turn a real community need into a working technology solution. Join AI Ready RVA's Healthcare Cohort for an inspiring, practical conversation about how AI is lowering the barriers to innovation and empowering healthcare professionals to create solutions that once required specialized technical teams. Matthew will share his journey from identifying a problem to developing GARDEN, including how he used AI tools to help build the application, how AI powers features within the app itself, and what he learned along the way. This isn't a presentation about what AI might someday do in healthcare. It's a story about what someone in our Richmond community is already building. What You'll Discover From Problem to Prototype: How years of hands-on experience revealed an unmet need and inspired a technology solution. Building with AI, Without Being a Programmer: How AI development tools can help subject matter experts translate their knowledge into functional applications. AI Inside the Application: How artificial intelligence is incorporated into GARDEN to support its intended experience. Making Healthcare More Inclusive: How technology can help reduce barriers to physical activity for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Lessons from the Journey: The challenges, discoveries, and practical insights that other healthcare professionals and innovators can apply to their own ideas. Meet Our Speaker: Matthew Scott Matthew Scott is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and…