After Google Exit, Fitbit Founders Build Family Health AI with Luffu
Luffu shifts health tech from individual trackers to shared family hubs where AI proactively monitors vitals, meds, and sleep patterns.
When James Park and Eric Friedman co‑founded Fitbit in 2007, they helped pioneer the wearables movement, empowering millions to take charge of their personal health through data. Nearly two decades later, the Fitbit co-founders are back with something new.
Two years after leaving Google, their new startup, Luffu, is pitched as an “intelligent family care system” that quietly uses AI to watch over multi‑generational households, surfacing issues before they turn into crises. The platform begins as a mobile app and is expected to expand into hardware in the near future.
At Fitbit, Park and Friedman helped normalize the idea that you should be able to see your own health data at a glance. With Luffu, they’re aiming at something more complex. The shared reality of family health.
In the U.S. alone, 63 million adults are now family caregivers, up 45% in a decade. Health data lives across portals, apps, calendars, lab PDFs, paper files, WhatsApp chats and half‑remembered phone calls. The founders’ core thesis is simple. The problem is that most tools are built for individuals, while real life health is collective.
Park’s own experience caring for his parents from across the country is the emotional anchor of Luffu. He describes trying to reconstruct his mother’s care from multiple portals and fragmented conversations, without wanting to “hover” or make her feel monitored. Luffu is being created as the product he wished existed.
"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 Friedman.
What Does Luffu Actually Do?
On the surface, Luffu starts as a mobile app and a shared “hub” for family health, safety, and caregiving. Families can track health stats and vitals, medications and dosing, symptoms and lab tests, doctor visits, notes and instructions, diets, and even pets’ health habits.
The platform's AI learns baseline patterns for each household and proactively flags deviations, such as unusual vitals, missed medications, or altered sleep patterns, without requiring constant manual checking. Family members can log information using voice, text, or photos, with the system normalizing data against household‑specific baselines rather than generic thresholds.
Luffu’s AI is framed as infrastructure rather than interface. The company says its system “isn’t a chatbot layer,” but a guardian that quietly tracks patterns and only steps forward when there’s something to say.
That doesn’t mean there’s no conversational interface. Families can still ask natural‑language questions and the entire conversation will have a continuous monitoring and inference engine.
A product that asks families to centralize intimate health information, across kids, elders and even pets, inevitably raises privacy and governance questions. Luffu’s early messaging emphasizes that users control what is shared and with whom, and that privacy and security are “paramount” for all family data. The company has also said that users will be able to choose whether their data is used to train its AI models.
Luffu has not disclosed its monetization strategy. Insurers, employers, and pharma companies may eventually seek access to anonymized or aggregated insights from family health patterns. Less tech-savvy family members will need intuitive consent tools. Health platforms have historically used "for your own good" framing to justify invasive practices, so execution matters.
"At Fitbit, we focused on personal health. But after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself," said Park.