James Park and Eric Friedman co-founded Fitbit, launching the wearable fitness tracker market that eventually became integrated into smartwatch technology. Google eventually bought Fitbit for US$2.1 billion in 2021.
Now, the two of them are behind Luffu, a new family health and caregiving app that combines data from wearables, health apps, and manual records of signs and symptoms, voice, medication, medical and doctor note entries, and lab test results for an entire family, even including pets.
How does Luffu do this? The app uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify various information resources and organize these into a comprehensive family health picture. The app is well-designed for family caregivers. It runs in the background, gathers health information from many sources, and then organizes it to highlight important well-being issues.
The app’s name comes from an Old English word, lufu, meaning love. Currently, it is software. In the future, Park and Friedman plan to add hardware.
The Luffu website describes its family-centric approach:
“At its heart, family caregiving is love in action, channelled through all of the gestures, big and small, that protect and nurture the people who matter most.”
The philosophy behind the app is to be “quiet most of the time,” and “helpful at the right time.”
Sandwich Caregivers Identified
By 2050, demographic trends project that 1 in 6 people worldwide will be 65 and older. Combine that with smaller family sizes, and the ratio of elderly parents to middle-aged children is creating a phenomenon called “sandwich caregiving.” Sandwich caregivers are around age 50, with elderly parents who are still alive. Sandwich caregivers, while helping their parents, also have dependent children. Looking after the generation that preceded them as well as the one that is following is no easy task. The role reversal of looking after aging parents can be shocking, particularly if a sudden health crisis happens.
Sandwich caregivers have little say initially on where elderly parents live. Many want to age in place, preferring to stay in their family home rather than downsize to a condominium or apartment. Mobility and sudden health issues can disrupt these strategies. Elderly parents, therefore, may need to move in with their sandwich caregivers. Alternatively, they may require an attendant care facility or retirement home.
Public Caregiver Support Resources
Today, there is an acknowledgement of the need to grow sandwich caregiver support as the median population rises.
A brief look at resources includes the following:
- In the U.S., the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC), founded in 1996, unites more than 80 nonprofit organizations focused on caregiving policy, advocacy, and research.
- Canada’s National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly (NICE) provides free online tools, research guides, and province-by-province program information for sandwich caregivers.
- In the United Kingdom, there is Carers UK.
- In Europe, more than 26 countries are associated with Eurocarers. The EU has published a study, called COFACE, involving over 60 national family organizations in 19 member states that looks at the challenges and needs of sandwich carers.
An App To Address Caregiver Needs
Enter Luffu, an app that learns the baseline health levels for every family member, that tracks childhood fevers to sandwich-caregiver high blood pressure, to elderly sleep disturbances and more.
Luffu aggregates all of this type of information, drawing on multiple information sources and a growing list of personal health monitoring devices, including:
A&D Medical Deluxe Blood Pressure Monitors, Apple Health and Apple Watch smartwatches, the Beddit Sleep Monitor, Evolv Wireless Blood Pressure Monitors, Fitbits, Garmin MARQ Commander smartwatches, Huawei GT 5 Pro Smart Watches, KardiaMobile, Omron blood pressure monitors, Oura Ring, Philips Sonicare advanced toothbrushes, Polar Vantage Smartwatches, Wahoo TrackR Heart Monitor, Withings Body Scan and BPM Connect Blood Pressure Monitor, and Xiaomi Mi Watch Lite.
To these, it adds medical notes from physicians, manual logs, images and accessible digital health records, which it then aggregates. Luffu’s daily Morning Brief summarizes the health status of all family members and prioritizes any urgent issues. Individual family members can control what data is shared, protecting their individual privacy. The app creates baselines for vital signs and activities. It tracks when medication doses are missed. The daily Morning Brief can even include health status reports on family pets.
Currently, Luffu in beta test is free. There is a waitlist that users can sign up for that is currently restricted to U.S. users. The app runs on mobile devices that use iOS (Apple) and Android OS. The beta test is focusing on core features and data aggregation capabilities.
