A founder story that started with personal health—and led to something bigger
In 2007, Park and Friedman founded Fitbit with the idea of making health accessible to all. They didn't just build a device—they built a global community that has moved trillions of steps together, turning personal health data into healthier lives for nearly 150 million people. What began as a "lightning bolt" idea—bringing motion-tracking from the Wii to your wrist—became a defining chapter in consumer health: a wearables pioneer, a rare profitable tech hardware company at IPO, and one of the world's most trusted platforms for health research. But after Fitbit, their lives changed—and so did their definition of health.
"At Fitbit, we focused on personal health—but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself," said James Park, Co-founder of Luffu. "I was caring for my parents from across the country, trying to piece together my mom's health care across various portals and providers, with a language barrier that made it hard to get complete, timely context from her about doctor visits. I didn't want to constantly check in, and she didn't want to feel monitored. Luffu is the product we wished existed—to stay on top of our family's health, know what changed and when to step in—without hovering."
The reason for building: health isn't just personal
The latest caregiving research estimates 63M or nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults are family caregivers (AARP + National Alliance for Caregiving in the U.S. 2025), up 45 percent from 10 years ago. The load falls heavily on caregivers in their 40s and 50s (average age 49, 58% female)—often the default "CEO of the family"—managing appointments, prescriptions and logistics with love, but out of necessity. For many, health becomes a constant question of who's okay and what needs attention across all the people and pets they care for, and their own personal health often slips in the process.
"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," said Eric Friedman, Co-founder of Luffu. "We're managing care across three generations—kids at home, busy parents in the middle, and my dad in his 80s who's living with diabetes and still wants to stay fiercely independent. And the moments that matter most are often the most chaotic: a late-night fever, a sudden urgent care visit, a doctor asking questions you can't answer quickly because the details are scattered. We designed Luffu to capture the details as life happens, keep family members updated and surface what matters at the right time—so caregiving feels more coordinated and less chaotic."
The market problem: Health tech wasn't built for families
Today's consumer health market is full of tools geared toward the individual—wearables for tracking/coaching, medical record portals and AI chat for reactive health Q&A. But real life health is shared across partners, kids, parents, pets and caregivers. Family information is fragmented across devices, portals, calendars, attachments, spreadsheets and paper documents, and even when sharing exists, the experience can be complex and limiting, leaving caregivers to connect the dots themselves.
The solution: Luffu, your around-the-clock guardian for family health & safety
Luffu fills this gap with a new kind of system—family-first, not individual-first—built to reduce the mental load of family care. Track the whole family's details effortlessly—health stats, diet, medications, symptoms, lab tests, doctor visits and more—and see the big picture of everyone's wellbeing so your care circle is on the same page and nothing gets missed.
Key experiences will include:
- Guardian moments: Luffu proactively watches for changes, and surfaces insights and alerts
- Effortless health & medication logging for everyone using voice, text or photos and connections to devices, health portals and other data sources
- Easy health Q&A using plain language to ask about your family's health & safety
- Share key health info with parents, spouses & caregivers
Proactive family intelligence, privacy by design
Luffu is powered by AI, but it's designed to feel more human and work quietly in the background—not AI tacked on for tech's sake. It isn't a chatbot layer; AI is built into the entire product experience to help families capture and organize health information, learn what's normal over time, notice what changed and get personalized proactive guidance that reflects real life—not generic answers. And because trust is foundational, Luffu is designed to be a guardian, not surveillance—users are always in control of exactly what is shared, with whom, and privacy and security are paramount for all family data.
Why Luffu? ("Loo-foo")
It's our nod to "lufu," the Old English word for love. Because at its heart, family caregiving is love in action, channeled through all of the gestures, big and small, that protect and nurture the people who matter most.
What's next
This is the beginning of a larger vision and mission to create thoughtful and human-focused products that keep families healthy, safe and connected. 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. To get a glimpse of the app and sign up for the waitlist for the limited public beta, visit www.luffu.com.
About Luffu
Luffu ("loo-foo") is a new company from Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, with a mission to keep families healthy, safe and connected. Luffu is an intelligent family care system and around-the-clock guardian, designed to proactively watch over your family's wellbeing to give you a little more peace of mind—because health isn't personal, it's shared. Luffu aims to simplify family care for the caregivers carrying the mental load across kids, parents, partners and pets. Luffu connects family care in one trusted hub—gathering your family's information from anywhere you can think of, learning your family's rhythms, and flagging meaningful changes so families can stay aligned, act earlier, and rest easier. Learn more and join the waitlist at www.luffu.com.
SOURCE Luffu
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