Luffu Link is a $250 wrist band with no screen on it at all, and its pitch is that it can call for help on its own LTE connection when your phone is nowhere nearby. It comes from Luffu, a startup founded by Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, and it is on preorder now ahead of an early 2027 ship date. The $250 figure is a preorder price; Luffu expects it to sell for $300 at retail.
What the Luffu Link actually does
The band has built-in LTE and GPS. Press its button and speak — the company’s own example is a wearer saying they have fallen and hurt their wrist and asking someone to come and get them — and Link sends that voice message to trusted contacts along with your location, your battery level and health data such as heart rate and recent activity. A double press sends a lighter check-in without a call or a text. Trusted contacts can also see where the wearer has been and get told when they enter or leave a defined area.
Underneath the safety features it is a fairly conventional tracker: activity, sleep, resting heart rate, calories burned, heart-rate variability and breathing rate. The same button also handles voice logging, so a wearer can record a note about a medication, a symptom, a meal or a mood in the moment, and the companion Luffu app files it into the family’s wider picture. That app launched earlier this year and uses AI to spot changes in day-to-day patterns.
The audience Luffu names is family caregivers, independent older adults, and health- and safety-conscious adults generally.
The screenless part is the point
“We want to be in the background. Link is designed to be on your wrist as a quiet guardian throughout your day”
That is Park, speaking to TechCrunch. He frames the absence of a display as deliberate rather than a cost saving — the design is meant to read as jewellery rather than as a medical alert pendant or a fitness tracker, which is a real concern for the older-adult market where visible monitoring hardware is often the reason a device ends up in a drawer. Link comes in three colours: halo gold, onyx black and sterling blue.
What to check before you preorder
An LTE radio in a $250 wearable normally raises the obvious question of what the connectivity costs every month. TechCrunch reports that the LTE data service is included and does not require a separate carrier plan. What the write-up does not put a term on is how long “included” runs for — whether that is the life of the device or a term that converts to a subscription later is the detail worth pinning down before putting money down on a product that will not ship until early 2027.
That is a general caution with connected wearables rather than an accusation about this one, but preordering a first-generation device from a new company months ahead of its ship date is exactly the situation where the recurring-cost terms matter most. The founders’ Fitbit track record is a reason to take the product seriously; it is not a substitute for a published plan-cost commitment.
Price and availability
- Preorder price: $250
- Expected retail price: $300
- Shipping: early 2027
- Colours: halo gold, onyx black, sterling blue
- Connectivity: built-in LTE and GPS; works without a phone in range
If you are weighing this against a more conventional tracker, our look at the Garmin fenix 9 and fenix 9 Pro covers the other end of the wearable price ladder. Luffu has also teased a home device that extends the system beyond the wrist, with no timing attached.
Source: TechCrunch
