The founders who built Fitbit into a wearables giant are now tackling elder care. James Park and Eric Friedman have spent two years building Luffu, an AI platform designed to help families monitor aging parents and coordinate care across multiple relatives.
Luffu combines conversational AI (think ElliQ or SeniorTalk) with family notification systems. The platform tracks seniors' daily patterns and alerts family members to changes, while providing an AI companion for the elderly person themselves. Park and Friedman are self-funding the venture with former Fitbit colleagues, including engineers from Vector Watch, the Romanian wearables company Fitbit acquired in 2017.
The timing matters. Fitbit's journey from 2-person startup (2007) to IPO ($358M raise, 2015) to Google acquisition (2021, $2.1B) taught Park and Friedman how to scale consumer health tech. As CTO, Friedman led the hardware and software that logged 275 trillion steps and 15 billion hours of sleep. Fitbit Premium demonstrated users would pay for digital health services: guided programs, doctor reports, partnerships with 100+ insurers.
But elder care is different terrain. Privacy concerns around HIPAA compliance and family monitoring are legitimate. The Caring Village app and similar platforms already handle family caregiver communication. ElliQ, the established AI companion for seniors, has years of dementia care refinements. Luffu will need to prove it offers something beyond combining existing categories.
The platform remains in private testing with no disclosed launch timeline or pricing. Park and Friedman left Google in 2024 after 17 years, choosing to bootstrap rather than raise venture capital. That's notable: they have the track record to raise at scale, but they're moving slowly this time.
The real question is whether the Fitbit playbook translates. Wearables scaled by making health tracking invisible and social. Elder care requires visible intervention and raises harder questions about autonomy, dignity, and who gets to watch whom. Park and Friedman shipped once. We'll see if the second act works.