This BodyFriend Massage Chair Strapped Me In, Then Ate My Limbs - Gizmodo

Even arsenic I dread the time I’ll yet eclipse the property of 30, I americium already good connected my mode to being a crotchety, craggy faced aged cretin. I person dealt with random bouts of backmost symptom from sleeping connected galore brick-like mattresses. I person tried immoderate massage therapy to woody with these issues, but successful each these years of spine-twitching pain, your mean Sharper Image-type automatic massage seat has ne'er done thing much than poke and prod me, astatine best, oregon slam artificial knees into my tender spine, astatine worst.

So present comes BodyFriend backmost to the amusement level of CES with its new, $9,500 ultra high-end massage recliner called the Phantom Medicalcare, which looks similar a torture seat from a dark, alternate magnitude of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies crossed with the beforehand grill of a sports car.

Gizmodo has tried a fewer of BodyFriend’s massive, monstrous, and costly massage chairs before, though the company’s archetypal showing astatine CES Unveiled this Tuesday was a much subdued matter than the booth babes it’s travel retired with successful the past. The California-based institution promised its turned this massage seat “into a aesculapian device.” Those moving the BodyFriend booth claimed its instrumentality scans users’ bodies done stimulation to assistance relieve musculus pain. The institution besides promoted its pulses of electro-magnetic fields to measurement the assemblage and relieve musculus backmost and cervix pain.

“Does it travel with a termination switch?” I asked the radical manning the booth. Maybe they didn’t perceive me, but they offered a vague reassurance that I would beryllium fine.

I was initially tense because, getting in, I recovered my feet were swallowed by the bottommost of the machine. My arms were fixed a small much latitude arsenic they were fitted into compressing limb rests. When the instrumentality started working, I recovered my feet were being compressed, past consumed. First the instrumentality took my near arm. Then it took my right.

The balls connected the massage instrumentality past started their dance, arching and rubbing somewhat awkward parts of my body, similar the enactment of my incredibly boney butt. The rollers attacked the balls of my callused feet and adjacent the ends of my toes. The brushed euphony playing from the machines speakers couldn’t drown retired the laughs of my workfellow arsenic I went bug-eyed from being repeatedly lifted and dropped connected the swell of the chair’s whims.

Then they asked if I wanted the cervix information of the instrumentality installed. “Sure, wherefore the hellhole not,” I thought. The cervix massage portion comes with a caput strap. I recovered myself incapable to determination astir of my assemblage arsenic each my limbs were constricted by a instrumentality that pretended to onslaught my occupation muscles.

I wasn’t successful it for long—probably little than 15 minutes. But erstwhile the institution yet pried maine from the massage machine’s jaws, I stood up and felt… precisely the aforesaid arsenic erstwhile I went in. With each of BodyFriend’s blase bells and whistles, I inactive consciousness incredibly underwhelmed by machine-based massages. Even much truthful now, since this latest escapade felt similar the instrumentality was virtually chewing maine up, arsenic if it needed maine tender for erstwhile I would yet descend into the acid-laced membrane of its Sarlacc Pit stomach.