Founders of Fitbit launch Luffu to keep families healthy, safe and connected

James Park and Eric Friedman helped shift the world into personal health tracking with Fitbit. Now they are turning their gaze outward. Their new startup, Luffu ("loo-foo"), tackles a day-to-day reality few tech products have tried to solve: caring for an entire family's health, together. It isn't just another fitness app. It is built as what the founders call an "intelligent family care system," designed to quietly learn your family's rhythms, gather scattered health data, and flag meaningful changes before small issues spiral into big ones.

This feels like caregiving made tangible. As Park explains, "health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself" after helping care for his own parents from afar. That personal touch is stitched into Luffu's design.

How does it work?

Luffu starts as a mobile app, with ambitions to expand into companion hardware down the road. The system hooks together health information from a wide range of sources — wearables like Fitbit and Apple Health, medical portals, calendars, voice, text and even photos.

At its core is AI that runs in the background. It:

• learns normal patterns for each family member
• organizes health stats, diet, symptoms, meds, tests and visits
• spots changes or trends early
• surfaces alerts and insights when they matter most
• lets you ask plain language questions about your family's wellbeing

You might ask Luffu about a loved one's sleep pattern or whether someone missed a medication dose. It's not a chatbot slapped onto data. It's a system built to feel natural and supportive, not intrusive. And families always control what data is shared and with whom.

Why does it matter?

Healthcare and wellness tech have largely been about the individual: step counts, sleep scores, calorie burn. But real life isn't that neat. Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults — around 63 million people — now act as family caregivers, juggling jobs, kids, elderly parents and pets. That burden often falls on people in their 40s and 50s, especially women.

In these roles, "health" doesn't belong to one person. It is shared across multiple lives. Fragmented information lives in different apps, paper folders, portals and texts. Luffu aims to knit these threads together — so caregivers spend less time chasing details and more time focused on the people they care about.

Eric Friedman puts it plainly: "In our house, health isn't a single person's project — it's shared, and I've felt how easy it is for my own health to fall to the bottom of the list." That sentence perfectly captures why this product exists.

The context

Luffu is the first major venture from Park and Friedman since they stepped away from Google two years ago. At Fitbit, they helped turn health tracking into a daily habit for millions. Now they are trying to push the next frontier: shared health intelligence.

Tech trends and demographic shifts make this a smart bet. AI is moving into every corner of health tech, but few platforms are designed for families instead of individuals. Luffu is claiming that space by integrating data across members and devices, and offering proactive insights rather than reactive reports.

The startup is currently in private testing with a waitlist for its public beta. But its vision is broader: a future ecosystem of services and hardware that act as the connective tissue for family wellbeing.