Deepak Arora didn’t set out to start a company. When he arrived in the U.S. in 2015, he’d already spent two decades forging a successful career in IT and health care technology in India and Canada. As a senior manager at IBM Watson Health, Arora directed global teams, oversaw projects involving artificial intelligence-integrated products, and had the kind of upward trajectory that made executive leadership seem inevitable.
But then everything changed.
In 2020, Arora and his family experienced a devastating loss: the death of his young daughter, Mahi, who drowned near their home in Hartland, Wisconsin. “We were five minutes too late,” he said. “And the thought just wouldn’t go away: How could we have prevented it?”
The thought became an obsession, and a couple of years later, Arora founded a tech company devoted to answering that question. The executive-turned-entrepreneur’s vision was simple: to develop a wearable, predictive safety device that uses AI to alert caregivers about potential accidents before they happen.
Learning to lead at Lubar
In 2021, Arora enrolled at UWM’s Lubar College of Business, drawn to the program’s new Executive MBA concentration in Integrated Health Care Leadership. He was still working at IBM but wanted to better understand finance, marketing and strategy.
For Arora, the curriculum instilled leadership skills that made him feel he could run a company. In 2022, leveraging his health care background and expertise in AI and software development, he launched Wearable Technologies.
Through UWM’s Milwaukee I-Corps program, Arora conducted market research that led to a crucial insight: the biggest opportunity wasn’t in the children’s market, due to parental concerns and other challenges, but with seniors, a growing segment of the population. That discovery prompted a strategic pivot to focus on older adults, for whom the leading cause of injury-related deaths is falls and wandering.
“I wouldn’t have been able to pivot if I hadn’t gone to Lubar,” he said. “At first, it was hard for me personally, but it made sense. The market we’re tapping into has a real need we can solve.”
Engineering a safer future
In 2025, Wearable Technologies was granted its first patent for an all-in-one safety management solution, Wear-Tech Companion, a smart device powered by AI that scans the environment for potential hazards.
The Wear-Tech Companion can learn a person’s daily patterns, detect anomalies and send alerts to caregivers in real time — whether for a fall, a medical concern or someone with dementia wandering.
“Our user is obviously the person wearing it, but the real user is whoever is monitoring and making sense of the data,” Arora said.
Unlike other wearables, the device has no screen, no need for cloud connectivity, and no reliance on apps. The data processing and decision-making happen inside the device itself — an important innovation that makes it both faster, secure and more reliable. According to Arora, the Wear-Tech Companion can respond to critical events five times faster than competing products. And that difference means everything.
Leaving a legacy of care
Since its founding, Wearable Technologies has gained national acclaim. In 2024, the company received first prize in a pitch competition in Las Vegas, along with the People’s Choice Award. Among other accolades, it was named a Top-10 AI company of the year by CIO Tech World twice in a row, and last year it was also recognized as one of the Top Trailblazing Startups by USA Today.
While the attention is nice, Arora cares about outcomes — the lives his technology can save, the families it can protect from tragedy. In 2025, Wearable Technologies partnered with Froedtert South to deploy devices for remote patient monitoring, allowing health care providers to prioritize high-risk patients and reduce hospital visits.
“If people think of Mahi when they think of safety, that’s the legacy I want to leave,” Arora said. “The next 10-20 years, there will be a huge push in the care economy — child care, elder care, mental and health care. Wear-Tech is positioned to help fulfill those needs.”