Fitbit's founders return with a $300 LTE care band
James Park and Eric Friedman are selling a screenless wrist device that calls for help without a phone. It ships in early 2027, and the pitch is aimed at family caregivers rather than runners.
Luffu, the startup founded by Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, has opened preorders for a wearable called Link.
The band has built-in LTE, so a wearer can send a request for help without a phone nearby. The data service is included, with no separate carrier plan.
It costs $250 on preorder. The company says the expected retail price is $300. Shipping is scheduled for early 2027, in three colours.
There is no screen. A single button press records a voice note — medication taken, a symptom, a meal, a mood — which the company's app then files against what it already knows about the household.
A double press sends a check-in to family members without a call or a text. GPS tells trusted contacts where the wearer has been, and when they enter or leave particular places.
In an emergency, the pitch is specific. The wearer presses the button, says what happened, and Link sends the voice message with location, battery level, heart rate and recent activity to family members.
The band also collects the standard set: activity, sleep, resting heart rate, calories burned, heart-rate variability and breathing rate.
Park's framing is that the tracking is not the product. "It's looking for patterns, so maybe your activity has been unusually low," he told TechCrunch, adding that the aim is to answer what changed, whether it matters, and whether someone needs to know.
He said the company was built out of his and Friedman's own experience caring for ageing parents, and that research shows family caregivers spend more than 27 hours a week on average doing it. That figure is Park's, and he did not name the study.
Link follows a Luffu health-monitoring app launched earlier this year, which the company says uses AI to organise family information and flag notable changes. The startup has also said it is working on a device for the home.
The target buyers, on the company's account, are family caregivers, independent older adults, and adults who want to keep an eye on their own health. That is a different market from the fitness band Park and Friedman built the first time, and a different one from the screenless wearables now aimed at individual performance.
It is also a market with a hard test built in. A fitness tracker that misreads a night's sleep annoys the wearer; a care band that fails to send a fall alert fails the person it was sold to protect.
The commercial detail founders should note is the bundled LTE. Including connectivity in a $300 device removes the friction of a carrier plan, but it puts a recurring cost on Luffu's side of the ledger from the day each unit ships. The company has not said how long the included service lasts.
Park and Friedman sold their first company to Google. The second one asks buyers to pay in 2026 for hardware that arrives in 2027, from a startup whose track record is the reason to believe them.