Luffu, a new startup founded by Fitbit’s co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, has launched Luffu Link, an LTE-enabled health and safety band designed to monitor the wearer’s overall health, both physical and mental.

The wearable device combines all-day health sensing, voice logging, location awareness, and the ability to get help from trusted contacts into a single device, even when no phone is nearby.

Luffu Link represents the next step in the startup’s mission to develop an intelligent family care system, as it complements the Luffu health-monitoring app, launched earlier this year. The app uses AI in the background to gather and organize family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes so families can stay aligned and address potential well-being issues.

The Luffu health-monitoring app was born out of Park and Friedman’s own experiences caring for their families and aging parents. They built Luffu to give families a clearer picture of a loved one’s health without constant check-ins or making them feel monitored.

Key Features of Luffu Link

• Press a button to capture information in the moment by voice, like updates about medications, symptoms, meals, mood, reminders, and more.
• The Luffu app then organizes that information and incorporates it into the family’s broader context.
• The wearable also continuously collects standard health and wellness data, such as activity, sleep, resting heart rate, calories burned, heart-rate variability (HRV), and breathing rate to identify daily patterns, track changes over time, and provide personalized insights or alerts.
• Link uses built-in GPS to keep trusted contacts informed of a wearer’s location, including where they have been and when they enter or leave specific areas.
• A quick double press also lets the wearer check in with family members without making a call or sending a text.
• Built-in LTE lets wearers send a help request without needing to use a phone.

The device is available for pre-order at a discounted price of $250 and is expected to ship in early 2027. It comes in three colors: halo gold, onyx black, and sterling blue.

Unlike other screenless wearables on the market that are focused on individual health and fitness, Link is designed around everyday health and family connection, the company says.

“Link does a lot of what a typical health tracker would do, but it’s not just about tracking,” Park said. “It’s about what Luffu does with that data. It’s looking for patterns, so maybe your activity has been unusually low,” he continues.

“Maybe your sleep patterns have changed. Maybe that change happened after a new medication. So it’s looking at all this data, and 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?’ And people can just continue to live their life without feeling like they’re being constantly monitored,”

The startup teased that it’s developing a home device that extends Luffu into the home, marking the next step in its intelligent family care system.

While Link is currently available for pre-order at a discounted price, its expected retail price is $300.

The company sees its market as including family caregivers, independent older adults, and health- and safety-conscious adults who want to stay on top of their health.

Research shows that family caregivers spend an enormous amount of time caring for their loved ones, with over 27 hours a week on average. Luffu Link aims to reduce this load by providing a tool that helps families stay aligned and address potential well-being issues.

“When you become a family caregiver, or the CEO of the family, these people are spending an enormous amount of time doing it,” Park said in an interview with TechCrunch. “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,” he said.