Fitbit founders debut AI startup to coordinate family care

Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman have launched Luffu, a new startup developing what they call an “intelligent family care system.” The venture, which comes two years after the founders’ exit from Google, represents a shift from tracking individual metrics to managing shared family health. The platform aims to help families proactively monitor their health, starting with an application and eventually expanding into hardware devices.

The startup is targeting a growing demographic of home-based care providers in the United States. According to a recent report, 63 million U.S. adults are family caregivers, representing nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults. This figure is up 45% from 10 years ago, highlighting the growing demand for tools that simplify domestic health coordination.

The motivation for the company stems from the founders’ personal experiences with eldercare. Park explained that his perspective shifted after his time at Fitbit. “At Fitbit, we focused on personal health—but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself,” Park said. He experienced these challenges firsthand while managing his mother’s health care across various portals and providers, with a language barrier that made it difficult to obtain complete and timely context about her medical visits without constantly hovering or monitoring.

The founders note that while the consumer health market offers numerous tools for individuals, family health information remains scattered across devices, portals, calendars, spreadsheets, and paper documents. Luffu uses background AI to gather and organize family information, learn daily patterns, and flag notable changes. Users can log health details—including health stats, diet, medications, symptoms, lab tests, and doctor visits—using voice, text, or photos.

The platform then proactively monitors for changes and surfaces alerts, such as unusual vitals or sleep patterns. The founders told Axios that users can ask questions in plain language, such as inquiring about how a meal plan affects blood pressure or whether a pet has received medication. Eric Friedman, co-founder of Luffu, noted that the system is designed to capture details as life happens, keep family members updated, and surface important information at the right time to make caregiving feel more coordinated and less chaotic. Currently, interested users can join a waitlist for a limited public beta.

Why it matters

The startup applies the founders’ experience in consumer health hardware to the fragmented, high-stress caregiving market, aiming to replace manual tracking with automated AI insights.