Helen Evans (00:37) 

Hello, my name is Helen Evans. I am the Head of Market Development for Safetytech Accelerator and I’m welcoming here Bryan Statham, who is the CEO of LifeBooster. And thank you, Bryan, for meeting with me today and agreeing to share your expertise and insights on the crucial role of emerging technology in tackling workplace safety and risk management. 

 

So over to you, Bryan, for your introduction. 

 

Bryan Statham (01:09) 

Sounds good. Thank you, Helen. It’s a pleasure to be here. Yeah, the emerging tech world is fascinating and it’s growing so rapidly right now. So I’m privileged to come and share some of those insights. But yes, I’m Bryan Statham. I’m the CEO and co-founder of LifeBooster. I really, you know, too many times in my life people have suffered life altering injuries in the workplace and they were completely preventable. And so I made it my personal mission to build a team of like-minded individuals to really find a way to solve this global epidemic of workplace injuries. So created LifeBooster 

A number of years ago, my background, I’ve got nearly two decades of experience in innovation and safety. And I wanted to bring technology to the workplace and to health and safety and risk management so that we can prevent workplace injuries and really improve on worker well-being. One of the things that brought us together is I actually sit on the advisory council for the National Safety Council’s MSD Solutions Lab, which has provided some incredible and deep insight into sort of the challenges and opportunities for safety technologies to address musculoskeletal disorders, which is where LifeBooster primarily focuses. So I’m happy to be here and really excited to share some insights with you. 

 

Helen Evans (02:28) 

Thanks, Bryan. So you didn’t start in the tech world, though. So yeah, first of all, can we hear your interesting journey into tech? 

 

Bryan Statham (02:39) 

Absolutely, yeah. So my educational background is actually in biomedical sciences and I had a goal to become a doctor and before going to medical school I wanted to travel the world, work in hospitals, clinics, orphanages, you name it, and really understand how different cultures practiced medicine and delivered care. Fast forwarding to when I got to Nepal, I actually had decided to not become a doctor and the main reason for that was primarily just the importance of family to me and not wanting to be an on-call dad. I know there’s ways to not be an on-call dad, but that was just my vision. And so I wanted to figure out what I was gonna do with my life. So it was just kind of an epiphany I had. And after my trip around the world, I came home to Vancouver, Canada. I had zero dollars to my name. And I ended up getting an opportunity to work in the investment banking world. 

 

And this is where I learned a tremendous amount of about business. I’d also learned a lot about business from my parents, mother, senior VP for a global bank. And my dad was an entrepreneur himself. And while working in the investment bank, that’s where LifeBooster was born actually. So one of my original co-founders, Stacey Wallen, was building a wellness company at university. And she’d actually invited me to join in building the business, which 

 

It started off, like I said, as kind of wellness. We won awards, we had significant recognition being provided to us, but we were two non-technical founders of a tech company. And the competition was overtaking. So it was a moment where we were contacted by a shipping company who needed some support on looking at their wellness programs, but also their health and safety. 

 

And so I actually have background in overseeing health and safety from an operations perspective in warehousing, hospitality, and a little bit in construction. And when we went in and analyzed the shipping company’s safety records, we were blown away. The direct injury costs that they were incurring was almost $6 million in the first half of the year, with the majority of those claims being musculoskeletal, which just in my history is completely preventable. 

So this opened up my eyes to the significant challenges that I had faced while in operations and overseeing warehousing and hospitality where safety was part of my responsibilities. And then just taking a step back and looking and focusing in on the people within our lives who had suffered injuries, about family members who had broken their backs while patient handling and becoming paralyzed only to miraculously get their feeling back in their legs years later. 

Friends who have passed out into hot tar while paving roads due to heat stress, burning off half of their body. Family members who had multiple spinal surgeries and having their lower spine fused, getting addicted to opiates to the point of overdosing, dying, and then being brought back to life with four doses of naloxone. And that’s actually an interesting fact I’ll share, 57 % of opioid-related deaths actually started with a workplace injury. And so that has been part of our mission, driving and dealing with that social and global epidemic. So all these injuries were preventable and there needs to just be a better way. So LifeBooster, as you know it, was born and we’re on a mission to ensure that every worker gets home safely every day. 

 

Helen Evans (06:19) 

That’s great. It’s great to work with a with a mission in mind as we do here at Safetytech Accelerator. As you, you probably encountered the same as us. Safety isn’t always enough to, to get these projects over the line. We often come up with barriers, you know, essentially budget, you know, how can we get the budget allocated? How do we get a better voice up to the boardroom. How have you tackled this problem at LifeBooster? Because I’m sure you’ve come across it. 

 

Bryan Statham (06:57) 

Yeah, absolutely. you nailed it. I think funding is one of the biggest challenges for safety professionals having to build these business cases and drive that upwards to the people who are making the decisions about the money. It’s actually interesting. We have a team member, Will, who is an ergonomist for a global beverage producer. 

One of our customers, and I’ll never forget when I was hiring him and asked, you know, how do you feel about sales? Because he’s pretty good at it. He said, you know what, I’m selling safety every single day, right? As an ergonomist at work and safety professionals are needing to collect as much data as possible, analyze it, present it and tie it to the business outcomes in a meaningful way. And the one of the big issues is that the data just isn’t there. It’s really difficult to get. 

Good and reliable data and safety has traditionally been thought of as a cost center, which it really shouldn’t because it absolutely ties to productivity and overall outcomes of the company. And so, you know, I feel for safety professionals when they’re needing to build these business case because it is like fighting an uphill battle. So it’s so important to have the vendor supporting and building the business case with the safety team that’s trying to bring in new innovation. So it’s all about collaboration, right? Getting the right data, understanding the current risk profile, and having the ability to showcase the undeniable reality of the current risk profile of the company, and then what the future state of the business would be if there was inaction. I think that’s really important. 

When injuries occur, it’s not just the direct cost and the indirect cost that need to be thought about. The cost of inaction can be astronomical. And I think this is a really important piece to share with all the different stakeholders who will be involved in the purchasing and investments. when you take more of an actuarial sort of perspective and truly understanding where loss can occur. 

Post injury or even with a reoccurrence, how that affects premiums, how mental health plays into the issues and all the physical, social and operational factors that are playing into the cost of injuries. That’s so important. it’s not just one person that is affected when an injury occurs. It’s the long tail secondary effects of injuries that can span an organisation. So working, especially when you’re looking at bringing in technology into your organisation, working with your technology vendor to support and building that business case, identifying which stakeholders need to be involved in the process, the right marketing, sorry, messaging, right? The messaging to an employee who might be, you know, wearing wearables or having their video taken or, you know, putting on an exoskeleton. You need to have their buying and talking about, 

We’re here to understand what your story is, what your day in the life of you is. And also to get to the point of saying, we want you to retire healthy and whole and with the capability to play with your kids. that personal story is really important. And then going all the way up to the boardroom, the stakeholders are huge and you want that buy-in, especially if you want enterprise success. So yeah, it’s going to be imperative to work it collaboratively as a team in building the business case so that you can drive investment into safety technologies. 

 

Helen Evans (10:13) 

And so you mentioned there, you know, the kind of, you know, some of the technologies. So, you know, how do you know what role do you know, predictive analytics or wearables, you know, or any other emerging technologies do you think play in this space to prevent injury? 

 

Bryan Statham (10:37) 

Yeah. 

 

So safety technology has been evolving consistently, but very slowly as well. And I think a part of this, you the last question you asked, it’s just the investment hasn’t been there. 

You know, it started off paper-based solutions to support kind of instant logging to automated production through the digitisation of procedures. And now we’ve got autonomous real-time risk identification, analysis, risk management through the use of new technologies. 

So I think safety professionals and management and executives now have the ability to have their finger on the pulse of risk across their organisations in real time and are able to plan and invest more effectively really into risk management through predictive analytics than they’ve ever had before. And this is inherently giving them the ability to provide more comprehensive support to their workers and are able to drive long term sustainable risk management. And when you get that long term sustainable risk management, it leads to risk reduction and injury prevention. And not just for a single work group, it can also be for new hires, it can be for returning workers, or people moving throughout the organisation from one job to the next because it’s always changing. The risk profile is constantly changing. so understanding that is going to be so critical. And so when we look at different data collections, solutions like wearables, as you’re saying, and computer vision, they’re enabling companies to gain insight into the risk at scale by digitising and automating risk assessments. that is absolutely critical and something that, you know, has never been an ability before. So, customers of ours have a handful of safety professionals managing thousands of workers each, sometimes in completely remote locations. you know, they’ve got 40 responsibilities in a day. And they don’t have the time to be out there conducting visual audits on everything and then having to build the programs and be effective. So a lot of times we’re stuck being just doing visual audits to be compliant. 

And then the risk management and control implementation isn’t happening as much. So how can we take that burden of having to do the visual audits away and give time back to health and safety professionals and risk management teams to be able to build programs that are truly going to drive risk reduction, be targeted in the right spots and lead to that long-term sustainable risk reduction that I was talking about. 

 

Helen Evans (13:08) 

So with digitisation comes efficiency and with efficiency can come cost savings. Is that an area that we need to focus more on as well to get these messages up to the boardroom or is that just a nice byproduct to have by introducing technology? 

 

Bryan Statham (13:30) 

No, honestly, efficiency is one of the areas that we talk about a lot. And it’s interesting because when you talk about time savings and things like that and cost avoidance, when you’re speaking with CFOs and the finance builders, like, well, if you’re saving time, they can be working on something else. It’s not that simple. mean, there’s a lot of complexities in the overall operations of it. 

 

Efficiency is so critical because as I was mentioning, you’re not having that time to go out and truly build programs that are targeted in the right area. 

No fault of the safety professionals, they go to school and they’re getting their certifications and they are having to learn so many different fields of study. There are people who go to school for years to learn about ergonomics and years to get into industrial hygiene and when you’re putting sort of the onus of safety on, you know, 

Certified safety professionals who are trying to manage all these specific areas and they have to go out and spend that time with 40 different responsibilities in a day and then build programs that are gonna make I mean, it’s extremely difficult so How can we give? Operational efficiency back to those safety professionals so that they can spend the time doing what they do best in building really intricate programs that are you protecting our workers and this is where you know, we really wanted to focus our effort and digitise effectively the continuous improvement model, data collection, risk analysis, risk identification and prioritization, control implementation and validation of controls. How can we give safety people and risk managements and executives the right data to be informed in the right way. Because if they can make decisions quicker, then they can implement more controls targeted in the right area and hopefully will lead to that sustainable risk reduction. yeah, operational efficiency is absolutely critical. I’ll share an example of a customer of ours. They had been trying to, this is one of the largest private companies in the world in food processing. 

They deployed us across 36 sites. And what was really interesting is they hadn’t in the three year period been able to conduct all of the risk assessments or what they call physical demand analysis in ergonomics to of all the different jobs and tasks that they have within their facilities. So they’ve never been able to get to that point of conducting all of those. And it’s just time. It takes a long time. And also, not having a full team that had the expertise to go in and do proper, accurate assessments. So they deployed us, and within a six month time period, they had completed all the assessments that they needed that they hadn’t been able to do in three years. And it could have been a lot quicker had we built the program a little bit differently, and that was a learning opportunity for us. But in the end, they had, it ended up being like 87 % increases in time savings. 

800 % operational efficiency gains. And now we’re working on building out the programs tied to the baseline and risk profile that we’ve found so that we can drive the risk reduction. I mean, it’s just super powerful in the gains you can get on operational efficiency. 

 

Helen Evans (16:47) 

which I’m sure outweigh the cost of LifeBooster time in product. 

 

Bryan Statham (16:52) 

it’s incredible. Technologies can lead to massive ROI and it just has to be shared in the right way and understood in the right way of where these gains are happening. Because it goes, it’s the operational efficiency plus the risk reduction and cost avoidance, but then also injury prevention as well. 

 

Helen Evans (17:04) 

Yeah. 

 

Yeah, yeah. So we’ve got to keep that injury prevention, you know, first and foremost, but yeah, bring in all the other things that will make the business, you know, implemented really. So we’re both members of the steering board for the National Safety Council in the US. What does that bring for a company like LifeBooster? 

 

Bryan Statham (17:39) 

Yeah, absolutely. mean, for us, being invited to be on the advisory council was incredible for us. We are a small company amongst behemoth organisations on the research side, education and regulation, the industry partners, the largest companies in the world, and thought leaders who are on the leading edge of developing new standards. I mean, it’s just, it’s been an incredible opportunity, but it is bringing together these top minds to really share in research and ideas and innovation so that we can build a better future for. 

Safety professionals and on the MSD Solutions Lab it’s focused in on musculoskeletal disorders on the ergonomic side. But so much of it also translates across all the various risks and exposures that companies face. 

So, for us, having the opportunity to understand here firsthand about the challenges that are faced by industry and by workers globally has been paramount in helping us really build a solution to address the MSD problem. And we’re talking about people’s health, wellness and their livelihoods, right? So being a part of the innovation and this thought provoking group is enabling us to ensure that we are building a product that the market needs versus just another shiny object. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of shiny objects out there. And so this has been a great, great opportunity for us also to share our thought leadership, right? And that’s one of the areas that we’re getting recognized in is just our approach to how we’re bringing our product to market. And so being able to really test and try and create and brainstorm and fail and be successful has been fantastic. 

 

Helen Evans (19:29) 

So what’s next for LifeBooster and what can we expect to see in the near future? 

 

Bryan Statham (19:38) 

Yeah, absolutely. mean, there are there’s a lot that’s going on. This is actually an exciting year for us. There’s a lot. I mean, everyone knows about AI and the various capabilities of that. LifeBooster was developed to truly as a platform to be able to ingest data from various sources and provide context around risk and really understand the root cause of why these risks are leading to injuries. And so we’ve got a significant focus on the AI. LifeBooster, it did start off focused in on musculoskeletal disorders. I’ve suffered them in industry and I mentioned two extreme examples, breaking backs leading to someone being paralyzed and also death. 

And to be honest, that was a meaningful place for us to start. MSDs are extremely challenging, so we wanted to focus in there. Heat stress was one of my other examples. We wanted to have that in there, and just with our technology, we were able to support on that. But also being able to move into other areas of risk and exposure, focusing in on proper risk management, enabling enterprises to gain access to that data because it’s not just the safety teams and the workers that are the benefactors of this type of technology. We’re talking about the HR groups, risk and liability, insurance, the executive, mean operations, engineering, all of these groups have the opportunity to gain insights that lead to better business outcomes, better decision making, and a lot of that is gonna be powered by AI. 

So we’ve got a really exciting product roadmap ahead of us that is incorporating our own technologies as well as integrations and also working with some of the leading insurance companies and service providers that are out there. We’re really excited for what this year is to come and also just in the market as well. When we think about safety technologies, it’s moving fast. 

And it’s exciting. so new safety technologies being developed so quickly, but we’re also seeing a lot that are disappearing. Those shiny objects that I was talking about, right? And so that brings challenges in, but you’re seeing a lot of companies that are getting past that showing real value. And there’s some fantastic, fantastic companies in computer vision and in wearables and in data analytics that are going to lead the way. Yeah. 

 

Helen Evans (21:58) 

Yeah. And just on the point of insurance companies, because that’s an area that we kind of are on the fringes of with our Cargo Fire and Loss Initiative, or we’re actually speaking to insurers in Australia. We find that, you know, there are areas where insurers are actually looking to tackle these problems directly with their with their policyholders? Do you think we should be doing more in that area? Is there a kind of wider responsibility that we can collaborate better with? 

 

Bryan Statham (22:34) 

100%. Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting because when we look at the workers compensation side of things and the claims side, I mean, there’s so much value in that data and bringing in predictive proactive type technologies and tying the data together is, you know, a winning combination. And then for those insurers that actually have a like a risk engineering arm. 

Those groups who are actually out there facilitating risk identification and control implementation and risk reduction, having the ability to expand their capabilities and their scale and support more organisations can be facilitated through safety technologies. And so we’re seeing success with our insurance providers that we’re working with who are now have the opportunity of new, well, talking about the money side, like new revenue streams, Having the ability to support their portfolio companies, you know, exponentially, but then also, again, being a benefactor of reduced injuries and therefore reduced disability costs on the back end. it’s a win for everybody because that helps to reduce costs. I think areas that we definitely need to get to is finding ways to, and maybe this is wishful thinking, but we’ve seen it a little bit here and there of having these technologies built into the policy right out of the gates. That will help in getting adoption up. That will help in reducing insurance premiums for companies that are adopting these technologies. And overall, it would be a huge win for safety technologies in general. 

 

Helen Evans (24:08) 

Yeah. And then we have seen it in the, you know, car insurance marketplace, haven’t we? You know, why can, can LifeBooster not be one of the components of the black box of these high risk industries? Yeah. And, you know, take LifeBooster and your policy comes down or we can actually ensure you one or the other. So, totally see that it, that it’s a way forward. As usual, absolute pleasure to, to spend time chatting to you, Bryan. 

 

Bryan Statham (24:20) 

Great. 

 

Mm-hmm. 

 

Helen Evans (24:37) 

Is there anything that you want to leave our audience with? 

 

Bryan Statham (24:42) 

I think the big thing is you got to get out there and try. You know, when we look at the technology field and the early days of, you know, testing products out and yes, there have been failures, but don’t let that hold you back. If you’ve tried something out four years ago and it wasn’t successful, technology is moving at an exponential rate. You should see what’s out there, especially when you’re looking at the likes of wearable technologies and advanced analytics and computer vision. mean, it’s just incredible. So get out there, test early, test often. And when you’re choosing your vendor, do a proper vendor selection process, but really make sure that you’re working with somebody who’s going to work collaboratively with you because we’ve seen too many times where customers of ours have built out these programs. It hasn’t gone to plan and then they’ve come back to us where we’re saying, listen, we will work collaboratively with you. And that’s why we’re seeing our solutions scale across organisations globally. 

 

Helen Evans (25:41) 

Great, thanks so much for your time Bryan. 

 

Bryan Statham (25:44) 

Thank you, Helen. It’s been a pleasure.