On a cold Tuesday morning in February, Travis McDonough sits at the front of a packed conference room in the Halifax Convention Centre, listening intently. He's been invited to the WHEN (Women's Health Equity Now) Movement, an initiative launched by the IWK Foundation to transform healthcare for women+ across the Maritimes and Canada.

McDonough is confident that Wellnify, his new wellness tech platform, can play a key role in creating better health equality for women in Canada.

From the new mom to the sedentary teenager to the senior craving social interaction, McDonough says Wellnify is built to take any community of users through a full range of gamified preventive wellness and community engagement. The goal is to make a lasting impact across society, gradually helping ease the strain on Canada's healthcare system. 

It's a long way from the first chapter of McDonough's career. 

Originally from Halifax, he studied kinesiology at Dalhousie University, then spent close to a decade in Ireland. After building multidisciplinary clinics for elite athletes, he returned to Canada and launched Kinduct in 2012. 

Kinduct's athlete management platform pulled medical, sports training, and performance data into one place for coaches, trainers and physicians, helping professional sports organizations flag injury risk and make evidence-based decisions instead of gut calls. By the time McDonough sold the company to motion-capture company mCube in 2020, more than 650 teams across the NHL, NBA, NFL and MLB had used it, according to Kinduct.

Wellnify, which McDonough co-founded with fellow Halifax native Duncan Addison, is a platform to be implemented through governments, schools, employers and health systems. Users are dropped into a daily "Wellness Quest" spanning categories such as Body, Mind, Spirit, and Community. Positive community actions, like picking up litter, volunteering, donating blood, and buying local, all count toward group rewards like grocery discounts or free bus passes.

Longevity Research

McDonough said the model traces back to research his team conducted on some of the world's longest-living, most connected communities.

"We went to places like the world's Blue Zones, and we studied the Amish," McDonough says. "The common denominator wasn't that they all had access to things to create a good life. It was that they prioritized serving others in their community. So, we're creating intentionality and gamification around paying it forward."

Physiological theory plays into the platform's design. 

"There's something called oxytocin that we secrete when we do things for other people, that's Mother Nature's way of keeping tribes and clans alive through millennia," he adds. "We're trying to tap into that oxytocin secretion, so people feel good about themselves and about the people they're living with."

So far, it's the platform's one community tab – its most social feature – that's getting the most traffic.

McDonough sees a role for the platform inside the healthcare system itself, not just alongside it.

"Physicians will use it to prescribe wellness, just like they do pharmaceuticals," he notes. "We're not just pushing exercise. One of the key components to a healthy community is doing things for other people in your community."

McDonough offers a concrete example of what that could look like at the community level.

"At a community centre, you'd have your physician, but you'd also have your nutritionist, your kinesiologist, your midwife – a whole portfolio of allied healthcare practitioners," McDonough says. "Wellnify lets you carry your own strength coach and your own nutritionist with you. At a moment's notice, you could say, 'I'm an 80-year-old man who lives in Pictou County, I've got osteoarthritis, and I have an $80 nutrition budget, tell me what I need to eat to reduce the inflammation in my blood.' And boom, it spits it out: here's exactly what to eat, click this button to add it to your shopping cart."

The company has run more than 30 pilots across North America. In Nova Scotia, in partnership with Invest Nova Scotia and the Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub, community rollouts have taken place in Pictou County, Cape Breton, and Yarmouth, along with scholarships supporting Dalhousie student-athletes. 

Users Increasing Activity

According to pilot data provided by Wellnify, early results show an average increase of roughly 2,500 daily steps per user, and more than 72 percent of users are moving from below the recommended 150 minutes of weekly activity.

Some of the content driving that engagement comes from outside organizations, McDonough said.

"We've got partners who serve as content partners: the Menopause Society, the Canadian Men's Health Foundation, and the largest senior care provider in the country (Shannex)," he says. "They have all this content, and it just sits on a website. We pull it into our platform and configure a digital ecosystem specific to the population they serve."

In February, Wellnify.ai powered the 2026 Healthier Texas Community Challenge. This eight-week statewide initiative connected more than 3,200 schools, employers, and municipalities into a single digital ecosystem. Wellnify reported 300 million steps logged, 50,000 activities completed and an 85 percent activation rate over the challenge.

More data is on the horizon back here in Canada, with Wellnify on the cusp of a similar deal with another province.

A national ambition is already taking shape. McDonough recently led a delegation to Ottawa for meetings with officials across three federal departments, including the Prime Minister's Office, as part of a broader effort called The Healthiest Nation Project. The initiative currently tabled would extend Wellnify's model into a shared, publicly backed wellness infrastructure for the country.

The pitch to Ottawa leaned on more than principle. McDonough has framed the initiative as a source of new economic activity for Atlantic Canada, estimating 35 direct jobs and more than 20 indirect ones, concentrated in the region and built through collaboration across all four Atlantic provinces. The idea would be established alongside a funding model designed to wean itself off government support over time, with private sponsors eventually underwriting specific populations, programs and challenges on the platform.

He added that the project could also generate data on balance and functional movement as well as community participation such as volunteerism and blood donation.

Healthcare Transformation

McDonough is also working with a group he calls the Canadian Healthcare Transformation Lab, put together by the Health Leadership Academy - McMaster University and Canadian Medical Association.

"It's essentially 35 people, like the president of the Canadian Medical Association, the CEO of the Canadian Space Agency, the head of Indigenous healthcare across Canada, the head of the nurses' union, three chief medical officers from the insurance companies," he says. "We've been pulled together to try to reimagine the Canadian healthcare system."

Over several weeks, the group modelled out four possible futures for Canadian healthcare.

"We ran four scenarios," McDonough says. "One was the healthcare system as it stands today. Another moved provincial responsibility toward the federal government. The third moved it toward community or municipal control, with federal guardrails but local decision-making. And the last was 'AI for all' – putting tools in the hands of the masses, the way India is doing with cell phones."

No single scenario won out, he said.

"It came out as a combination of the third and fourth scenarios; community-driven, with digital infrastructure, but with a fairly tight scope federally, so there's still the ability to connect with other communities for buying power," he notes. "The one thing we know is that it can't exist as it is today, because the healthcare system is buckling."

That framing of prevention as infrastructure, rather than an afterthought, is one McDonough traces back to his own family.

His grandfather, Lloyd Shaw, and his mother, Alexa McDonough, were central to the creation and evolution of Canada's New Democratic Party. The latter also became a national trailblazer for women in politics.  

"I acknowledge that I was born rounding third base, and I don't feel guilty for the privilege I was born into," he says. "What I do feel is that sense of obligation and agency to take what I've been given and help other people. That's why I love that phrase: 'that societies grow great when old people plant trees whose shade they'll never sit under.' 

"That's the mission we're on. We're thinking about this three, four, five generations from now, because that's the mindset we need to really solve the problem we're in."