Fitbit co-founders launch Luffu Link, an LTE band for family health and safety

James Park and Eric Friedman, the co-founders of Fitbit, have returned to wearables with a device aimed squarely at families. Their startup Luffu on Tuesday announced Luffu Link, an LTE-enabled health and safety band designed to monitor both physical and mental well-being, and to call for help even when no phone is nearby. According to TechCrunch, the band is up for pre-order at a discounted $250, will carry an expected retail price of $300, and should ship in early 2027 in three colors: halo gold, onyx black and sterling blue.

A system for the family CEO

Link is the hardware half of what Luffu calls an intelligent family care system. It complements the company's health-monitoring app, released earlier this year, which uses AI in the background to gather and organize family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes so relatives can stay aligned.

Park told TechCrunch the company grew out of his and Friedman's own experiences caring for their families and aging parents. "When you become a family caregiver, or the CEO of the family, these people are spending an enormous amount of time doing it," he said, citing research showing caregivers spend more than 27 hours a week on the task on average. While he believes technology can shrink that load, he said the tools available to caregivers today are "pretty fragmented."

Luffu sees its market as family caregivers, independent older adults, and health- and safety-conscious adults who want to keep tabs on their own condition.

Sensing, logging and calling for help

Like a conventional tracker, Link continuously collects activity, sleep, resting heart rate, calories burned, heart-rate variability and breathing rate to build a picture of daily patterns. The emphasis, though, is on what the software does with that data. Park, who noted he designed many of Fitbit's data dashboards, said the goal is not to hand families another screen full of graphs but to answer a few key questions: "what changed? Does it matter? Does somebody need to know?"

A button press lets wearers capture information by voice in the moment, such as medication updates, symptoms, meals, mood and reminders. The Luffu app then folds that into the family's broader context.

Location and safety features sit at the core. Built-in GPS keeps trusted contacts informed about where the wearer has been and when they enter or leave specific areas. A quick double press checks in with family without a call or text. Built-in LTE, with data service included so no separate carrier plan is needed, lets a wearer send a help request without a phone. In an example described to TechCrunch, someone could press the button and say, "I fell and hurt my wrist. Can someone come get me?" and Link would deliver the voice message along with location, battery level, heart rate and recent activity to trusted family members.

Designed to disappear

The band has no screen, which Park said is deliberate. Unlike other screenless wearables that focus on individual fitness, Link is built around everyday health and family connection. Park described it as "a quiet guardian throughout your day," with design cues taken from jewelry rather than a generic fabric wristband or a bulky emergency pendant, so people can go about their lives without feeling constantly monitored.

Luffu also teased its next move: a home device that extends the family care system into the house.

Why it matters

The co-founders of Fitbit are betting that the next phase of wearables is not personal fitness but family care. Link's core proposition is that the value of health data lies less in charts and more in AI-driven interpretation, noticing, say, that sleep patterns shifted after a new medication, and routing that insight to the people who can act on it. The target audience, family caregivers and aging adults who want independence without constant check-ins, is large and poorly served by today's fragmented tools, and bundling LTE service removes a common friction point for safety wearables. If the approach resonates, it could pull the wearable market further away from step counting and toward always-on, low-friction family care, with Park and Friedman once again trying to define what a wrist-worn device is for.