Ontario teen using tech to address health in the trades

Key Takeaways:

• A Ontario high school student has created CrewConnect, an anonymous reporting and insights app for construction workers, inspired by watching his grandfather suffer long-term health consequences from decades of physical labour in the trades.
• After interviewing groups and workers, Taylor discovered that mental health struggles, physical injuries, harassment, and substance use remain widespread.
• CrewConnect is currently in a limited pilot and uses AI to summarize worker feedback into actionable formats for site managers, with Taylor planning a broader rollout, though he notes that young tradespeople generally aren’t thinking about long-term health consequences yet.

The Whole Story:

Growing up as a farmer in Ireland, Brendan Taylor’s grandfather Johnny worked with his hands his whole life. When he came to Canada, he worked as a boilermaker. Before he passed away in 2023, Taylor travelled with him to his hometown to see the farm, but the years of hard physical labour had taken their toll. 

“He had to be in a wheelchair the whole time, or use a cane, and was taking pain medication,” said Taylor. “That’s when we started diving deeper into his life and I started to realize that some of the injuries he received while working led to a lot of the longer term issues he had.”

The Ontario high school student began digging to see if modern tradespeople still faced health issues and if there was anything that could be done to address them. He found that many in the industry continued to grit their teeth through injuries and awareness of other issues, including discrimination, harassment, substance use and mental health challenges had risen. 

“When I started talking to people, I thought I would find that more progress would have been made to find a solution. I was surprised that it hadn’t,” said Taylor. “But I was also surprised and glad to see that there were a lot of people who supported fixing those issues and actually cared about them a lot.”

With a father who works in software, an engineer to assist, and his own tech skills, Taylor wanted to create a tool that could identify and address these issues before they worsened. The original product was to combine mental and physical health tracking with a workforce scheduling app. But when no companies showed interest, Taylor pivoted to a proactive reporting and insights tool. 

CrewConnect helps construction companies take a more proactive approach to job site culture, safety, and worker well-being through anonymous daily feedback and operational insights for site managers. It’s currently being piloted with a handful of companies and continually refined. 

Crews and their leaders are set up on the app and can anonymously report mental and physical health issues. Those is are then turned into data-driven charts that can raise the alarm with leadership

“We had our first initial version which had a lot of glitches and wasn’t the best looking. But as we develop, we’re getting a lot of cool new features. It looks nice and we even have a new AI summarizer that just came out,” said Taylor. “It’s able to take all of the insights that Crew Connect collected and it summarizes it into a toolbox talk format, so you get all the key ideas and some practical advice to make the environment better.” 

Taylor says that this streamlined process can make reporting issues take seconds rather than wading through paperwork. And app users can choose directly who that want to report an issue to if they wish. 

Following their limited pilot with a few companies, Taylor is planning a mass rollout of the tool with larger companies, skilled trades companies and municipalities. 

“I feel like it’s heading in the right direction for being a preventative, proactive solution,” he said. 

Talking about his peers, Taylor explained that many of his friends are planning to go into the trades but their minds aren’t focused on health. 

“A lot of them are doing apprenticeships and co-ops right now, so I think there is a strong desire for it,” he said. “But they don’t think of that long-term aspect too much. When you are young you think you’re invincible. I was at an event last week and they were talking about benefits and pensions and how the young guys don’t really care, they’d rather just have more money.” 

When it comes to mental and physical health in the trades, the data backs up Taylor’s concern. 

Statistics Canada data and industry research suggest about one in three construction workers in Canada report poor mental health, while a BC Building Trades–backed study by the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan found 83% had experienced moderate to severe mental health issues such as depression or anxiety. 

Serious physical harm is also common, with workers in construction suffering lost-time injuries at rates roughly double many other sectors, driven by musculoskeletal injuries that account for about 30% of injury claims and more than a quarter of claim costs, according to research summarized by the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada and Canadian ergonomics studies. 

Industry and public-health reports further show construction has among the highest suicide rates of any major workforce and is overrepresented in the toxic-drug crisis, with federal data indicating that roughly one-third to one-half of employed people who die from opioid overdoses worked in the trades. 

National surveys on workplace harassment and violence, including work by Statistics Canada and the Canadian Labour Congress, report widespread harassment, bullying and discrimination across Canadian workplaces, with elevated rates for women, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ workers in male‑dominated sectors like construction, underscoring how toxic jobsite cultures compound already severe physical and mental health risks.