GoKawiilLuffu, a new startup from Fitbit’s co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, on Tuesday launched Luffu Link, an LTE-enabled health and safety band designed to monitor the wearer’s overall health, both physical and mental. The wearable combines all-day health sensing, voice logging, location awareness, and the ability to get help from trusted contacts into a single device, even when no phone is nearby.
The currently $250 device is available for pre-order and is expected to ship in early 2027. It comes in three colors: halo gold, onyx black, and sterling blue.
Luffu Link represents the next step in the startup’s mission to develop an intelligent family care system, as it complements the Luffu health-monitoring app, launched earlier this year. The app uses AI in the background to gather and organize family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes so families can stay aligned and address potential well-being issues.
Image Credits:Luffu /
Luffu was born out of Park and Friedman’s own experiences caring for their families and aging parents. They built Luffu to give families a clearer picture of a loved one’s health without constant check-ins or making them feel monitored.
“When you become a family caregiver, or the CEO of the family, these people are spending an enormous amount of time doing it,” Park said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Research shows over 27 hours a week on average, which is a crazy amount of time…I think technology can play a big role in helping reduce this load, but as we found out, the tools to help them are pretty fragmented,” he said.
Link users can press a button to capture information in the moment by voice, like updates about medications, symptoms, meals, mood, reminders, and more. The Luffu app then organizes that information and incorporates it into the family’s broader context. The company sees its market as including family caregivers, independent older adults, and health- and safety-conscious adults who want to stay on top of their health.
The wearable also continuously collects standard health and wellness data, such as activity, sleep, resting heart rate, calories burned, heart-rate variability (HRV), and breathing rate to identify daily patterns, track changes over time, and provide personalized insights or alerts.
“Link does a lot of what a typical health tracker would do, but it’s not just about tracking,” Park said. “It’s about what Luffu does with that data. It’s looking for patterns, so maybe your activity has been unusually low,” he continues.
Image Credits:Luffu /
... continue reading