Fitbit Founders Debut AI Platform for Family Health Tracking

Who needs a chatbot, when you can call on a guardian?

Former Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are returning to the health technology spotlight with a new company aimed at a different challenge.

Their new AI venture, Luffu (pronounced “loo-foo”), has launched. It positions itself as an “intelligent family care system” designed to help families coordinate health, safety, and caregiving across generations.

Announced in San Francisco, Luffu reflects a shift from the individual-focused health tracking that defined Fitbit to a broader, shared model of care. The company is starting with a mobile app and plans to expand into complementary hardware over time, with a limited public beta now open via waitlist.

Post-Fitbit rethink

Park and Friedman founded Fitbit in 2007, helping pioneer the consumer wearables market and popularizing the idea of continuous personal health tracking. Fitbit went on to reach nearly 150 million users worldwide and became a major platform for health research before being acquired by Google in 2021.

Since leaving Fitbit, both founders say their relationship to health has changed, shaped less by steps and metrics and more by caregiving responsibilities within their own families.

“At Fitbit, we focused on personal health—but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself,” said Park. “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.”

Park’s experience mirrors a broader trend as families become more geographically dispersed while simultaneously living longer with chronic conditions that require coordination rather than constant supervision.

Caregiving by the numbers

The founders are entering a landscape where caregiving is increasingly common and increasingly complex. According to recent research from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, an estimated 63 million U.S. adults now act as family caregivers, nearly one in four adults nationwide. That figure represents a 45 percent increase over the past decade.

Caregiving responsibilities often fall on people in their 40s and 50s, many of whom are balancing careers, children, and aging parents at the same time. This group, sometimes referred to as the “sandwich generation,” is also disproportionately female and at higher risk of burnout and declining personal health.

Friedman explains, “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.”

He pointed to moments of crisis, such as late-night illnesses or urgent medical visits, as points where fragmented information becomes a real risk rather than a mere inconvenience.

“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,” he said.

The platform and its approach

According to the company, Luffu’s system uses AI in the background to gather and organize family health information, learn patterns over time, and flag meaningful changes. Planned features include proactive alerts, shared care circles, medication, and symptom logging through voice, text, or photos, and plain-language health questions covering both health and safety.

The founders emphasize that Luffu is not positioned as a chatbot or constant monitoring tool. Instead, they describe it as a “guardian” that prioritizes consent and selective sharing.

Privacy and trust, they say, are central to adoption, particularly when dealing with sensitive multi-person health data. Users will control what information is shared, with whom, and when.

Implications

Luffu’s launch highlights a broader shift in health technology toward proactive, contextual care rather than reactive tracking. It also signals growing interest in tools designed for caregivers, a group that has historically been underserved despite its size and economic importance.

By using their experience building one of the most widely adopted health platforms in the world, Park and Friedman are betting that the next frontier of consumer health lies not in optimizing individuals, but in supporting the relationships that hold families together.

The company says its long-term vision includes an ecosystem of hardware designed to complement the service, though details remain limited.

For now, Luffu’s success will likely hinge on whether families trust a single platform to centralize some of their most personal information—and whether it can truly reduce, rather than add to, the mental load of caregiving.

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