O-040 Towards an AI-Informed Capacity-Building Framework for Occupational Health

The speed of development and variety of potential applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology represents significant intellectual and practical challenges to practitioners and researchers in the field of health and safety at work. While these challenges are likely to dominate research agendas in the coming years, knowledge and expertise about the technology among practitioners in the field of occupational health is currently limited. The challenge is to raise capacity within the occupational health sector so as to establish a coherent and defensible approach to judgment and decision-making about AI. This should address: • The operational and regulatory challenges relating to health and safety at work that AI presents, and how regulators might respond; • Potential opportunities for implementation of new technology (including AI) to improve health and safety at work; • Identifying the foci for research activity to address these questions. Here we present a framework under development at the University of Manchester in partnership with the Thomas Ashton Institute for regulatory research. In recognising the need to bring together disciplinary perspectives, the framework aims to create an inter-professional network involving technologists and OH specialists to establish a “pincer movement” between: 1. Bottom-up descriptions of the technology, its mechanisms, its provenance, its developmental trajectory, and potential impact on occupational health; 2. Top-down descriptions of organizational, social, phenomenological and ecological implications of the technology Early results from this initiative, including results from an inter-professional Delphi study will be presented, identifying key learning needs in the interrelationship between work, health and technology.