It’s normally at the point of a massage when the therapist stretches and squeezes each of my knuckles individually that I start to feel emotional. It’s not because the treatment is almost over. There’s just something about being lavished with that much attention to detail that triggers an overwhelming sense of gratitude.
Is anything more rarified for a caretaker of young kids than feeling taken care of yourself? At my most recent massage, I reached no such moment. For one thing, the therapist never got to my hands. For another, it was a robot.
Getting a massage from a robot, it turns out, is more fun than relaxing — at least at first — and it’s a little more practical than pampering. But if the whole thing sounds like science fiction, it’s not: The 30-minute service is now bookable for $75 at the Lotte New York Palace hotel, the first hospitality partner for automated wellness brand Aescape. Aescape is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Eric Litman, whose foray into robotics has been roughly seven years in the making.
He tells Bloomberg that he’ll ship 200 massage robots to hotels and gyms by the end of the year — including at least 10 Equinox locations — with a plan to further ramp up production in 2025. More His vision: to disrupt a slice of the global wellness industry, valued at $5.6 trillion in November 2023, with on-demand services and automation.
“We are the first commercial example that we know of where robots are directly coming in contact wi.