Fitbit founders launch Luffu Link, an LTE health and safety band

Luffu, a new startup from Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, launched Luffu Link on Tuesday: an LTE-enabled health and safety band meant to monitor a wearer’s physical and mental health, combining all-day health sensing, voice logging, location awareness, and the ability to call trusted contacts for help even without a phone nearby. The device is available for preorder now at a discounted $250, with an expected retail price of $300, and is set to ship in early 2027 in three colors: halo gold, onyx black, and sterling blue.

Link builds on the Luffu health-monitoring app launched earlier this year, which uses AI in the background to gather family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes. Park and Friedman built Luffu out of their own experience caring for 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,” Park told 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.”

Users can press a button to log updates by voice — medications, symptoms, meals, mood — which the app organizes into the family’s broader context, while the band continuously tracks activity, sleep, resting heart rate, calories, heart-rate variability, and breathing rate to flag changes over time. “It’s not to give families another dashboard full of graphs — I designed a lot of that at Fitbit — it’s to help answer some key questions like ‘what changed? Does it matter? Does somebody need to know?’” Park said. Built-in GPS keeps trusted contacts informed of a wearer’s location and movements, a double-press lets wearers check in without a call or text, and built-in LTE — included with no separate carrier plan required — lets a wearer send a help request directly, along with location, battery level, and recent health data, without needing a phone. Unlike screenless wearables built for individual fitness, Link is designed around family connection and takes design cues from jewelry rather than a fitness tracker. The startup is also developing a home device to extend the system further.

Why it matters

Luffu is betting that family caregiving — not personal fitness — is the more durable market for wearables, wagering that a band designed to feel like jewelry rather than a monitor will get worn by people who’d otherwise resist being tracked.