Neural Notes: How Kindship is tackling the NDIS with AI

Welcome back to Neural Notes, a column where I look at some of the most interest AI news of the week. In this edition: The co-founder and CEO of Kindship on building an AI tool — Barb — to help families tackle the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

Kindship wants to make the NDIS more accessible to families

Kindship launched Barb in August 2023 as a response to families needing streamlined support in navigating NDIS funding and care pathways. Barb addresses these needs, providing practical assistance and guidance.

While it may be a startup now — one which was just awarded $100,000 (much like Empathetic AI) in Australia’s inaugural AI sprint — Kindship began its life as a community for parents raising children with disabilities. Back in 2022, it raised $1 million via a fundraising campaign on Birchal.

“We had, at one point, over 4000 members as part of our community, which obviously gave us a huge amount of conversational data to work with,” Kindship co-founder and CEO, Summer Petrosius, said to SmartCompany.

What Kindship found was that families were struggling significantly with navigating the NDIS landscape.

Barb’s AI is able to solve this by leveraging publicly available data and integrating it with individual NDIS plans to provide personalised support.

Barb’s key features include the ability to draft complex documents.

“Families have to write a carer impact statement to justify and advocate for funding, which can take them up to three weeks to write. Barb can do that in 30 seconds,” Petrosius said.

Barb also offers a Q&A functionality to help with NDIS queries, such as initiating plan reviews or finding appropriate service providers.

In the near future, Barb will also be able to make real-time needs-based adjustments, which ensure that support recommendations are continuously updated based on the latest data and feedback from the family and their support network.

“Often, NDIS documents were written years ago and have just been rolled over by the government,” Petrosius said.

“Barb will soon be able to tackle the challenge of constant goal adjustment and needs changing by capturing progress data.”

Petrosius expanded on this with an example of a 16-year-old whose NDIS plan was written when they were 13 and no longer matches their support needs.

“Barb will be able to say to the family, ‘You need to log every single incident related to their new needs,’ and then generate reports based on this data for advocacy purposes,” Petrosius said.

Kindship is hoping for systemic change informed by real-world data

In the future Kindship envisions Barb evolving to support families pre-diagnosis and potentially expanding into other areas like aged care.

“We’ve already had interest in using Barb as a navigation software tool in the aged care space, because there’s a lot of questions from particularly children putting their family into supported living — what do they do, what does that look like and what does the funding do,” Petrosius said.

Given the sensitive nature of the data being used by Kindship to power Barb, security and accuracy are imperative.

“We have quite a lot of security measures in place currently, including a zero data retention policy, so any conversation that’s had with Barb is only stored on that person’s mobile device,” Petrosius said.

Kindship is also planning to collaborate with universities to enhance Barb’s safety framework and maintain rigorous standards for data management and user privacy.

Kindship also hopes that the data and insights gathered by Barb can inform systemic changes as well as NDIS and government policies.

“Our overarching vision was always to change the narrative around childhood disability and disability more generally,” Petrosius said.

“We want to ensure that the voices and experiences of these families are considered when developing care models.”

Other AI news this week

Channel 7’s YouTube account was hacked — its videos replaced to look like a Tesla channel, including a livestream of an AI deepfake Elon Musk.
Bill Gates reckons that despite AI being notoriously power hungry, that it could help with climate targets.
This AI chatbot wants to help Australian SMEs with their taxes.
In news shocking to no one, more Aussie workers are using AI without telling their bosses.
OpenAI has pushed out ChatGPT’s upcoming voice mode feature
Reddit hates AI crawlers.
Major record labels like Sony and Universal Music are suing AI song generators for alleged copyright infringement.
Meta has begun testing AI chatbots created by users over on Instagram.