Parenting a child with ADHD or autism doesn't stop between appointments. And this is an introduction to neuly.ai. Ash Ruddy is the chief growth officer at Neuly. It's an AI powered support platform for parents of children with ADHD and autism. And Neuly was developed with Professor Edmund Sunuga Bark, who gave our opening keynote speech yesterday. And it's registered with the MHRA as a class one medical device. It aims to feel like a trusted confidant for Behrens, and it bases its support on clinical research rather than generic wellness advice. Ash leads Neuly's Growth Partnerships Ambassador Network, bringing a commercial background, personal experience as as a parent. And you may have heard of... Heard Ash on our podcast just last month.

And in the next few minutes, Ash is gonna share how you build an AI tool for parents that parents can actually trust in in one of the most sensitive areas there is. So without further ado, let me bring on Ash. Hi. Good afternoon, Henry. Good afternoon. And, I'll try and make you bigger. There you go. Good afternoon.

So the floor is yours. Thank you so much. I've been so inspired by this conference. And the thing that struck me as we're starting to talk about parenting neurodivergent children is, Henry, you've so cleverly interviewed so many guests and asked them about their early years. Because what we know is that the early years are so fundamentally important to all people, but especially for neurodivergent children. So it's been really inspiring to hear their early stories. We're gonna talk about parenting neurodivergent children and what tools we have, to help us now use and harness the power of technology in ways that are safe, clinically vetted, and research backed, which is what we have done at Neuly.

If I could just ask the slides to be put up, Henry. And while they're while they're, while they're loading, I'll just, sort of introduce, this concept of using technology to best help children to thrive. So many of you heard the keynote yesterday from Edmund Sunuga Bark, our cofounder, and I thought it was just so apropos that he was talking about flourishing. Because really at the heart of Neuly is helping children to flourish and to thrive. So what we're realizing is that parents are really overwhelmed and stretched in the modern era. Next slide, please. In the modern era, as they are trying to navigate these systems that often feel insurmountable, but also having lack of support through lack of community. You know, we oftentimes.

Don't have other family members or friends that understand our children to the level that they need to be able to give good support. We often struggle to find after school clubs and holiday activities that suit our children's profiles. And, also, we sometimes, as much as we try, have a lack of understanding as well of, like, what the full picture is because so much of what we're given through assessments and clinician appointments does often come from a deficits framework. So parents of neurodivergent children are really up against it. And what we know is overwhelmingly, they are starting to turn to large language model AI. They need it in those moments in between clinician appointments and therapist appointments.

They need a safe place to turn to, but the problem becomes turning to something that doesn't have research backed, clinically vetted safety rails, which is why we have built Neuly. So I was one of those parents who was turning to large language model AI to help me parent my child. I'm the mother of two, and my eldest has complex neurodivergence, including a severe ADHD profile and is also on the pathway to an autism diagnosis. And before we built Neuly, even though I've created quite an ecosystem of support around my son, I needed help. I needed help understanding how he thinks, why he behaves the way he does, and how he experiences the world. So I, like many families, was turning to chat GPT. And sometimes the output was decent.

And sometimes it really missed the mark. But more than anything, I was having to keep telling it the same information over and over again, which as we know, parents of neurodivergent children have to do that constantly, and it becomes quite a burden. So the tool really was not fit for purpose. And thinking about it not being fit for purpose, the other reason it wasn't fit for purpose is because right in its own t's and c's, it says it is not meant to be used for these purposes. This is why we built Neuly. We wanted to create something that parents could trust that came from world leading researchers and clinicians that interacts with them like a friend twenty four hours a day.

So Neuly in The UK has been registered as a class one software as a medical device. And what that means is that we are held to a very high standard of quality, efficacy, and most importantly, accountability. So what is Neuly? Neuly is an AI companion app for the parents of neurodivergent children. It helps them with deep depth understanding of their children and also helps them to navigate the moments that they find tricky day to day. As I mentioned, it was cofounded with professor Edmund Sunuga Bark. We also have a panel of really incredible clinical advisers who are all real domain experts in neurodivergence, including Michael Absood, who is not just a researcher but works with children in clinic with neurodevelopmental.

Conditions day in and day out. Also, everyone on the senior leadership team are either parents of neurodivergent children or are neurodivergent themselves. So there is lived experience as well as these, really incredible clinicians and researchers living this product. We also built this product with over 100 families premarket, and these 100 families helped us to understand how they were using Neuly, what they needed to be built into Neuly to make it better, and also provided us with some really incredible testimonials, including one mom who's now become a friend who said that it was actually life changing. How does it work, and how do you how do you interact with it?

So Neuly is basically... Feels like having a friend on the other end of the phone that you can either voice with or text with or very cleverly connect your WhatsApp and WhatsApp with. And it feels as though you have a friend available to you twenty four hours a day who happens to have the research of professor Edmund Sunuka Bark, already in its mind, but talks to you like a friend. And as a parent of someone, you know, who really struggles with sensory needs and regulation, I can't call my clinician at 10AM on a Sunday, and I certainly can't call my OT at, you know, 2AM on a Tuesday when my son is struggling to sleep. So these are the moments that Neuly really comes to the fore.

And, again, you can voice with it, you can text with it, or you can WhatsApp with it. I'm gonna show you two really, kind of fundamental pieces of the platform. And first, I'm gonna start with profiling. So this is not a deficits led framework. And if you listened to Edmund's keynote yesterday or if you've paid attention to Edmund's massive body of work, what you'll come to realize is that... And what he's taught me so much about is being very strengths affirming, very neuro affirming, and to really look into the the gifts and this... The incredible special people that these children are. And so Neuly includes this in our Neuly profile. So the Neuly profile does pull from the WHO's ICF framework, the international classifications.

Of functioning. And this is really the gold standard for helping us to understand how people think, behave, and experience the world. And one of the reasons we use ICF in part is because it takes onboard environment and context. It doesn't just look at what cannot be done, or from a deficits framework. We've taken ICF's core sets for autism and ADHD that then we have expanded upon them to create the Neuly profile. And importantly, that includes special interests, motivations, and strengths of these children. What you're seeing on the right hand side of the screen is a snapshot of the in-depth insights page. There are just really clear and concise paragraphs about how this individual child communicates.

What their body rhythms are, what their emotional landscape is, what motivates them, and, yes, what they do find difficult. But the language behind it is... It's unlike one that a neurodivergent parent is used to reading. You know, my son was born extremely prematurely, and we have had countless reports and assessments of our of our child. And when I first read his Neuly profile, I welled up with tears because I've been so used to reading reports and assessments and profiles that talk about what he can't do, what he is not able to do, what he probably will never be able to do. And it was when I read his Neuly profile and got quite emotional because, yes, it did explain the things he finds tricky, but it explained where and how he thrives.

So everything just sort of started changing my language and also even my posture towards him. And with those 100 parent testers I mentioned earlier, many of them have come to me and said, wow. I've never I've never read something that has captured my child, really the essence of my child, and I've certainly never read one page that really covers all of them. It doesn't just look at something in isolation. And that was the whole point of doing the profiling the way that we have done it. You'll see in the top right hand corner, your in-depth insights pages can be downloaded. So the parent carer can choose to share this when a child's going to a new school, is gonna have a new teacher.

Maybe for a new babysitter or family member to care for them. We've had, some of our early users sharing it with after club... After school club coaches or, even their church communities. It can be a really wonderful way of giving a strengths affirming picture of the child to others. And one of the hidden benefits of that as a mother who feels like they're constantly telling their child's profile in various ways over and over and over again is we don't have to give those verbal updates the whole time. We can give a quick PDF and hand it over. One of my favorite moments of building Neuly so far was when one of my testing mothers came to me and said, we've been on a wait list for a pediatrician for eight months. And.

I downloaded my insights page and sent it to the pediatrician in advance of our first appointment. Now for any, parent of an ND child, you know how those first appointments go. They are usually us trying to regulate our child and make them feel comfortable in an uncomfortable environment while trying to answer clinicians' questions verbally and recalling information or thumbing through our notes. So this mother actually provided the in-depth insights page to the clinician ahead of the appointment. The clinician read it in the first five minutes of the appointment and then spent the entire appointment actually assessing and interacting with the child. And this is really the way we start to shift things, where clinicians, therapists...

It doesn't replace any of them. It's meant to work alongside them. And this is where we can start to not only optimize everyone's time, but also help them to see these children in a really strengths affirming and holistic manner. Now really at the heart of Neuly are strategies. And we know parents are trying so hard, yet we still struggle with moments every day that we find tricky, and we just are not trained to to know how to handle. Even for parents who do have access to therapists and, individual education plans, it can still be really challenging to know what to do in the home setting in those moments that you didn't get to ask a therapist about or you haven't discussed with school.

And so parents are turning to Neuly and asking about these moments day to day. We're finding a lot of people are asking about transitions. And, of course, things like food refusal, school refusal, meltdowns are all on the list. I've been using Neuly for three months, and I've built 13 strategies for the things we find tricky day to day. And what I love about them, as you can see on the screen, they're really simple. One or two sentences about what the strategy is and then a quick few steps about how to implement the strategy. Neuly will also help you to decide when you should use it and how to know if it works.

And a parent carer can just log a check-in against that strategy. Now you can go into Neuly's web application or soon to be released mobile application to log your check ins. Or what many of our very busy parent carer users do is they just voice message or text message with Neuly, and Neuly will grab all of that information without you needing to go in in a manual way. I can tell you anecdotally, there is something very special about how we do this in-depth profiling piece and this strategy piece that then the AI comes on board and personalizes to the special interest of the child. And that's where these strategies start to have some real movement because Neuly knows what the child is motivated by.

Where does our strategy bank come from? This is not just an LLM scrape of the Internet. Currently, we have 170 strategies built into Neuly. And how do they get there? They have to cross some really, strict bars. First, they have to have multiple peer reviewed papers and or clinical trials, not one, multiple. And after that bar is crossed, they then have to be personally signed off by one of our clinical advisers who's a domain expert in that area. So what Neuly is doing as the parent is simply having conversations with Neuly about what's tricky is it's grabbing their full profile. It's grabbing from the strategy bank. It's mapping the right strategy to the profile, and then the AI is personalizing that strategy to the child.

So you can see in this example, this is a this is a primary school child with an ADHD profile who's highly motivated by football. So a lot of the strategies that this parent has created end up being around football. And this one was really simple. The child was struggling to go from kind of play garden area time after school up to relaxing bedtime and was experiencing a bit of a medication rebound during that time. So Neuly helped the mother create a strategy of implementing some heavy work and proprioceptive feedback, of course, football based, to help that child transition from one time of the day to the other time of the day. I can tell you in the three months I've used Neuly and, as I mentioned, created 13 strategies for my own child.

12 of the 13 strategies worked the first time and have continued to work over the months. So there is something really special about the mapping that we're doing. So what are our early users saying? It's been really overwhelming. We are also passionate about this product, and it makes us feel just enlightened and and so more... Even more purpose driven when we know that other parents are having success with our products. Ninety eight percent of early users report finding it helpful overall, 100% saying they would recommend it to another parent, and zero reports of harmful advice. This is really important to us. Neuly is fully GDPR compliant. As I said, it's a class one software as a medical device. We also run AI evaluations.

At scale. So we are looking across 22 risk dimensions and running synthetic conversations, 22,000 of them at a time to monitor for safety. And the reason that we've built it this way is because we wanna use the power of technology, but in a way that parents can really trust. We don't want them to have to keep saying the same things over and over again. We want them to have a one stop shop where they can go, where they can trust the output, where they can feel like they are going to someone in the very, very top of their child's neuro profile fields to get the strategies and insights that can really be life changing because we want these children and these families to thrive. With that being said.

We would really welcome anyone in the globaladhd. Community to give it a try. We have worked with ADHD UK to offer our most generous extended trial offer. That's a full thirty days for you by using that QR code, and we are making that available until the end of October twenty twenty six. And, actually, Henry, you yourself gave me a really good piece of insight in being neuro affirming when we started building and said, I also don't want there to be any credit cards up front because sometimes our community struggles with remembering to cancel subscriptions.

So we took that on board, and your trial does not require a credit card up front. We really just want parents to try it. And we are a mighty team. We want to hear from you. Please reach out to us on socials, on LinkedIn, or hello at Neuly dot a I. We're here to help you. We want to see your family thrive, and we know how incredible these children, when they are able to flourish, can contribute to communities much like many of your previous speakers in this conference.

Ash, thank you so much for introducing us to neuly.ai. It's... We were just... I was obviously just talking to Marissa about AI and the frontier that it that it is and what it can do and how exciting it is. And obviously, you're building something to work, to pioneer off that. And it's... It is exciting and it's a... And it's a good offer for people to try it at no cost themselves without any risk of signing up, I was grateful that you did. Can tell everyone it took absolutely zero level of asking beyond going.

Please keep... This is the issue. And they're, fair enough. That's a good point. And that was wonderful. And it shows you where their heart is in terms of trying to help people and make a difference. And I think it's a very, very interesting product. We're delighted that you're here telling people about it in this pioneer stage and telling about your... And you're kinda talking about your own experience and your own child and how it's made a difference and that you're building something for you and for everyone. That's actually a wonderful thing. Ash, you've been wonderful. And I need to give you the applause because I... I'm I'm leaving the try Neuly up, so just in case. Thank you.

Oh, thanks, Henry.

It's obviously a bit of fun, but it's it's it's a thank you. But I have to say goodbye because we're running on... Obviously, running to to... I'll turn on to the schedule. Thank you very much, Ash. You are amazing. You're absolutely extraordinary. Wonderful. Thank you so, so much. Have a great rest of your day. And thank you.