Meet EmTech Care Labs: Helping Families Navigate Dementia Care at Home
StartUp Health community member Aarabi Balasubramanian, CEO & Founder of EmTech Care Labs, is building Care-Wallet™, an AI-enabled, human-first care management platform that helps families and physicians coordinate dementia care at home, starting in Maine and Massachusetts.
The Challenge
Aarabi Balasubramanian’s journey into caregiving innovation began with her own family. When her mother in India started experiencing unexplained falls and functional decline, Aarabi and her brother spent nearly five years searching for answers. Their path stretched across multiple physicians and hospitals in two countries before they finally received a Parkinson’s diagnosis.
Yet diagnosis was just the starting point. Aarabi quickly learned that most of the work of caring for someone with a neurodegenerative condition happens at home, often without guidance. Even with her healthcare strategy background, she struggled to navigate the fragmented landscape of appointments, benefits, transportation, safety planning, and daily routines. Living in rural Maine further clarified the challenge. Reaching the nearest hospital can take an hour, and for many older adults, that distance makes timely care difficult or impossible.
Aarabi realized that if her family – resourceful, motivated, and medically engaged – had this much difficulty, countless others were silently overwhelmed. The caregiving crisis was bigger and more universal than she had understood.
Origin Story
Before launching EmTech Care Labs, Aarabi spent fifteen years working in corporate strategy and innovation across pharma, biotech, and healthcare. She moved from engineering into product marketing, earned her MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School, and eventually shifted from advising companies to leading strategic initiatives herself. She thrived on accountability and problem solving.
But her personal caregiving experience exposed a gap that corporate roles could not touch. Coordinating her mother’s care during COVID illustrated how little support exists once patients leave clinical settings. Families are left to navigate everything else on their own: the social, emotional, financial, and logistical layers that influence health just as much as any medical intervention.
She began to understand that care at home required a holistic, human-first approach that integrated clinical guidance with real life circumstances. Technology could support it, but genuine care required empathy, expertise, and continuity. That belief, rooted in lived experience, became the foundation for EmTech Care Labs.
Being part of the StartUp Health community, especially the Caregiving and Brain Health Moonshots, gave Aarabi the peer support she needed as a solo founder tackling a complex area. Shared experiences, hard lessons, and deep purpose helped her stay anchored as she moved from idea to execution.
Under the Hood: Inside Care-Wallet
Care-Wallet is EmTech Care Labs’ virtual care management platform, built specifically for families managing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias at home. It is currently available to patients in Maine and Massachusetts, while caregivers can live anywhere.
When families enroll, they begin with an in-depth onboarding session led by an intake care manager. This conversation captures far more than medical history. It includes daily routines, safety concerns, cognitive and behavioral changes, social and family dynamics, and the financial picture that determines eligibility for Medicare, Medicaid, and various state programs.
From that foundation, Care-Wallet generates a comprehensive care plan that brings together the needs of both the patient and the caregiver. The plan evolves over time through monthly check-ins and ongoing communication. Care managers, supported by AI tools, help families anticipate changes, prioritize tasks, and stay connected to the right resources so care becomes more proactive than reactive.
Physicians remain part of the loop through concise updates that show how patients are doing between visits. The recently launched Care-Wallet CarePartner program allows primary care physicians and geriatricians to extend their care management services virtually, giving them deeper visibility into the lived experiences of their aging patients.
For families, Care-Wallet provides clarity and relief. For clinicians, it offers a clearer view of the whole person, not just the diagnosis list from a single appointment.
What’s Next
Aarabi’s Health Moonshot vision is bold and deeply personal. She wants Care-Wallet to be the trusted partner families and physicians turn to the moment a neurocognitive condition is diagnosed, offering immediate clarity and relief.
Short-term goals include completing the pilot research study with the University of Maine Center on Aging, expanding Care-Wallet’s availability across Maine and Massachusetts, growing the Care-Wallet CarePartner program, and extending support into more rural and underserved communities across New England.
To accelerate this progress, EmTech Care Labs is raising a seed round and actively inviting families, caregivers, and physicians to share their experiences, join the study, or explore partnerships.
Aarabi’s mission is rooted in compassion, practicality, and lived experience: no family should have to navigate dementia care alone.
Supporting the Journey Ahead
We are proud to support StartUp Health community member Aarabi Balasubramanian as she builds a more humane, comprehensive, and empowering model for dementia care at home. Her vision for EmTech Care Labs and Care-Wallet reflects both personal conviction and system-level insight, and we are excited to watch her scale this important work to families and clinicians across the country.
Learn more & get in touch with EmTech Care Labs
