Leveraging Generative AI to Support People with Learning Disabilities in Their Daily Lives

People with learning (intellectual) disabilities are excluded from numerous aspects of society and need good quality support to live fulfilling lives. Digital technology can provide new ways to support people in their daily lives. Generative AI (GenAI) is a type of Artificial Intelligence technology capable of creating new content, including textual and multimedia, based on its training data and provided context. GenAI technology is fast evolving, with a large collection of free, open-source and paid models that can be fine-tuned and retrained using custom data for specific contexts and integrated into diverse workflows and devices. This means that GenAI technology has the potential to be used to provide highly personalised support for people with learning disabilities in their daily lives, using bespoke, customised, or off-the-shelf models on a diverse range of hardware devices. This 18-month project aims to investigate the potential of using GenAI to support the daily lives of people with learning disabilities, empowering people to co-design novel and impactful solutions with expert technical support. This inclusive research project will include two co-researchers with learning disabilities, collaborations with organisations that provide support to people with learning disabilities, and an advisory group including people with learning disabilities and people that work closely with them. Research participants will be five groups of approximately 8 people. One group will be paid carers (e.g. support workers) who support people with learning disabilities, the other groups will be people with learning disabilities. Each group will participate in a focus group to assess and support their understanding of GenAI, identify the current ways in which people with learning disabilities and paid carers are using GenAI tools, and identify issues associated with the use of GenAI. Groups will then take part in workshops utilising creative methods to generate ideas for potential applications of GenAI for people with learning disabilities and their paid carers. Workshops will be supported by specially designed knowledge kits which will include simplified explanations of GenAI and sensory items to help understanding. Data from focus groups and workshops will be analysed using thematic analysis, and current and potential uses of GenAI will be extracted and prioritised, respectively. Finally, the groups will take part in co-design workshops to refine and create low-fidelity prototypes of prioritised novel GenAI ideas with high-impact potential from those generated in previous workshops. The knowledge kit and current uses of GenAI will be shared on the project website and made freely available for others who want to introduce GenAI to people with learning disabilities. Recommendations will be developed for social care service providers, organisations run by people with learning disabilities (e.g. self-advocacy groups), AI developers, policy makers and researchers to address the identified opportunities, barriers, ethical concerns, and risks around using GenAI to support the daily lives of people with learning disabilities. Recommendations, co-design processes, resulting prototypes, and other outputs will be shared at a dissemination forum, with social care and academic networks and through online and offline communication channels of collaborating organisations and advisory group members.