Built from 15 years inside the work.
Rugged didn’t start in a meeting room. It started on heavy industry sites — and grew through clinical practice and active research. Built by someone who’s worked all three sides of workplace MSK risk.
Founder & Director.
I’ve spent the last 15 years working at the intersection of heavy industry and workplace health — in operational roles inside the energy sector, then in clinical practice with high-exposure industrial crews. What I kept seeing was the same pattern: organisations had injury data, but they didn’t have risk visibility. By the time a claim landed, the chain that produced it had been running for weeks.
I’m now an Accredited Exercise Physiologist and a Higher Degree by Research candidate at the University of Sydney — formalising 15 years of operational practice into a peer-reviewable model for workplace MSK risk. Rugged is the platform expression of that work.
Four problems I kept hitting.
Rugged’s design isn’t aesthetic. Each decision is a response to something I watched go wrong, more than once, across 15 years of working inside this category.
WHS data was all lagging
Every dashboard told the same story: incident counts, lost time, claim costs. Useful for reporting. Useless for prevention. The signal that mattered — where exposure was concentrating, where capacity was depleting — wasn’t being captured anywhere upstream.
Training was the default lever
Roll out a manual-handling refresher, hope for the best. Training has its place — but it kept being used as a substitute for actual risk assessment, because the data needed to do real assessment didn’t exist.
Capacity was invisible
Every worker has a different capacity profile — physical, fatigue, recovery, prior injury history. Most risk tools ignored this entirely. A task that’s safe for one worker isn’t safe for another. Risk is the ratio, not the load.
Evidence didn’t survive
The decisions WHS leaders made, the controls they applied, the rationale behind them — all of it lived in someone’s head, a spreadsheet, or an email thread. When they left, the evidence trail evaporated. Audits got hard. Boards got nervous.
Active Higher Degree by Research candidate at the University of Sydney — formalising 15 years of operational practice into a peer-reviewable model for workplace MSK risk.
Talk to someone who’s actually
done this.
If you’ve got a manual-handling workforce and the lagging-indicator story isn’t enough anymore, book a 15-minute scope call. It’s not a sales pitch — it’s a direct conversation with someone who’s been on your side of the table.