James Park and Eric Friedman are moving from tracking steps to managing the mental load of family care
Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman have announced the launch of Luffu, a new AI-powered platform designed to coordinate health and safety tracking for entire families.
The self-funded startup, currently in a limited public beta, departs from the individual fitness tracking that defined the founders’ previous work at Fitbit.
Instead, Luffu serves as a family care system for the ‘sandwich generation’ of adults managing their children’s healthcare needs and their aging parents’ care.
The platform uses AI to integrate data from health platforms, medical portals, and user inputs to learn a family’s specific daily rhythms and proactively flag meaningful changes in health data, medications, or doctor visits.
Reducing the load
According to the founders, the goal is to reduce the mental load on family caregivers by gathering fragmented information from health portals, calendars, and spreadsheets into a single hub.
That means medications, symptoms, and dietary preferences are all in one place, with Luffu’s AI tracking each family member’s (including pets) specific health habits in the background. It will also provide proactive alerts for missed medications or unusual shifts in vital signs that might otherwise go unnoticed.
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(Credit: Luffu)
Users can log data using voice, text, or photos, and the system is designed to provide personalized guidance rather than generic reactive answers. And the app also features a ‘Family Morning Brief’ that summarizes the health status of everyone in the household.
The platform also supports natural-language queries, allowing users to ask specific questions such as “Did Mom take her blood pressure medication?” or “How have the kids’ sleep patterns changed this week?”
Hardware will soon complement the platform
While Luffu is launching as an app-based service, the company has also confirmed plans to expand into a hardware ecosystem of first-party devices.
“This is the beginning of a larger vision and mission to create thoughtful and human-focused products that keep families healthy, safe and connected,” the platform’s release notes.
“Luffu begins as a service for people with an app experience, with the goal of expanding into an ecosystem of first-party hardware products designed to complement the service.”
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What form these will take is unknown, but it wouldn’t be a surprise—given the founders’ background—if the lineup includes a wearable with advanced health monitoring.
Either way, the move marks a significant next step for Park and Friedman, who led Fitbit through its $2.1 billion acquisition by Google before departing in January 2024.
They noted that their own personal experiences with aging parents and the lack of tools for remote caregiving inspired the venture.
We’ll be keeping an eye on this one over the coming months and beyond. For now, though, those interested can join the Luffu waitlist via the platform’s website.
