The professional view of Ollie: what's built, what's in progress, and where we need expert partners.
Ollie is a safety-first AI companion-and-safeguarding system for isolated autistic and learning-disabled adults. This page is written for the people whose job is finding out what's real — because that's exactly what we want you to find.
Initial focus: adults. Any extension to children or young people would be a separate programme, governed by the ICO Children's Code.
A low-cost bedside device, built around a routed safety architecture.
A small on-device model handles everyday companionship. Turns are routed by severity: light, everyday chat stays on the device; anything with emotional weight goes to a stronger cloud model. Every reply is independently audited before it's shown — cloud-audited when online; offline it falls to a curated safe floor only, never a generated guess. Any sign of distress escalates to a named human carer, who is always in the loop.
See the family-facing page, including a step-by-step walkthrough of one message through the system.
Built, drafted, or in formation — stated plainly.
We publish this the same way we track it internally: nothing is called finished until it is.
| Area | Status |
|---|---|
| Technical safety architecture — deterministic crisis guard, routed inference, fail-closed reply audit, adversarial testing | Built and tested. |
| Data protection by design — local-first single-file storage, content-free safety logs, fail-closed signed updates, minimised cloud exposure, no-cloud encrypted backup | Built — verified in the codebase. |
| Provider terms: customer content never used to train models | Confirmed (Anthropic Commercial Terms §B). |
| Data Protection Impact Assessment (UK GDPR Art. 35) | Drafted; professional review and the ICO template still to come. We treat a DPIA as a legal precondition of any real-user pilot, and the draft already exists. |
| Safeguarding Adults Policy — named lead, escalation pathway, Care Act 2014 | Drafted; seeking a safeguarding-experienced reviewer. |
| Clinical sign-off of the pilot design | Not yet obtained — a hard pre-live gate we set ourselves. No real user until a qualified clinician confirms it's safe to proceed. |
| Community Interest Company — asset-locked, mission-locked | In formation. |
This page exists to find these people.
- A clinician (learning-disability or safeguarding-experienced) to review our structured safeguarding questions and give a focused "safe to proceed" pilot sign-off. We've prepared the exact questions — it's a structured review, not an open-ended favour.
- A safeguarding-experienced charity partner for a co-produced pilot — the charity as accountable applicant with ethics and lived-experience governance, Ollie as the technology.
- A DPO or data-protection reviewer to take the drafted DPIA through the ICO template, including the cloud provider's data processing terms.
- CIC or social-enterprise governance advice — we're already working with a local social-enterprise support body on the CIC structure.
- Pilot funding — get in touch and we'll share the current funding pack.
The lines we hold, on purpose.
"Ollie helps detect distress, but does not diagnose or treat."
Ollie is not a medical device, not therapy, and not a crisis service. It does not replace family, carers, the NHS, or emergency services — it brings them in faster. The AI never makes an autonomous safety decision; a human carer is always in the loop. Ollie is designed and positioned as a companion, not a medical device — the formal software-as-a-medical-device determination is a question we're seeking regulatory input on early, precisely because it shapes everything downstream.
A document pack for partners doing due diligence.
These carry operational and personal detail beyond what belongs on a public page, so they're shared directly rather than posted — email us and we'll send what's relevant to your role.
- Clinical & safeguarding brief, with data-protection information requirements
- Data Protection Impact Assessment (draft)
- Safeguarding Adults Policy (draft)
- Current-build evidence pack