You can now get a robot massage at Equinox, Four Seasons, and the Mayo Clinic — and the machines are getting harder to dismiss. Can a robot deliver what human therapists spent years perfecting?
Anyone who has ever spent the back half of a massage wondering whether to ask the therapist to go harder — and then decided not to — will understand the appeal of a machine that takes instructions on a touchscreen. The feedback loop in human massage is famously awkward: you are supposed to be relaxed, you are naked, lying face-down, someone’s elbow is in your trapezius, and there’s never a good moment for chit-chat. The robot, by contrast, has a screen mounted right in front of your face. You tap what you want. It adjusts. Nobody’s feelings are involved.
This is the central pitch of Aescape, a New York startup whose robotic massage tables have been gaining momentum at Equinox locations, Four Seasons hotels, and Marriott properties across the United States. The machine — two long white arms extending from a padded table, with warm, rounded knobs at the ends — begins each session by performing a body scan, collecting more than 1.2 million three-dimensional data points before making contact. Before any of that, the person receiving the massage puts on a compression suit, stretchy and slick from neck to ankle, which allows the cameras to read the body’s topography with the specificity the arms will need. The overall setup has the visual logic of a medical procedure; the experience, according to those who have had it, is something else entirely.
It currently has machines in more than 100 locations and expects to add several hundred more. A 30-minute session costs less than a human session, too: about $60.
“The overall effect is pretty good,” a Fortune reporter wrote after trying the machine in March 2025 — a sentence that manages to be both modest and, given the circumstances, genuinely remarkable. Aescape founder Eric Litman, a tech entrepreneur who built the company after two years of unresolved chronic neck pain, is less restrained. “We think we’ve hit the sweet spot,” he told Fortune. The company raised $83 million in new funding that same month, with investors including Valor Equity Partners and NBA All-Star Kevin Love, and announced plans to expand into physical therapy and professional sports.
Last September, all-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady joined the company as chief innovation officer, bringing his recovery and longevity protocols to Aescape.
“After 23 years playing professionally, there’s no way I could have accomplished what I did professionally without all the massage work and recovery protocols,” Brady told CNBC. “The reason why I’m still able to do what I love to do is because of the bodywork, the care that I received on a daily and weekly basis, and I want to try to make that available for everybody.”
The machines in the room
Aescape is not alone. Capsix Robotics, a French company whose iYU system uses a medical-grade Kuka robotic arm fitted with a patented articulated hand, has positioned its technology specifically at the intersection of clinical care and luxury spa. The arm is designed to adapt in real time to the body’s contours — the hollows of the lower back, the raised ridge of the shoulder blade — using a contact membrane called iYU skin, a silicone surface engineered to approximate the feel of human touch and used with or without oil. It has found early adoption in spa and wellness clinic settings across Europe, where the clinical framing has given it credibility in markets that might otherwise approach a robotic massage arm with skepticism.
At Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, researchers have been studying a third system, EMMA — Expert Manipulative Massage Automation — a robot trained to deliver Tuina, the therapeutic Chinese bodywork technique used primarily for musculoskeletal conditions. “Some people call it Chinese massage, but it’s actually a very comprehensive approach that is mostly used for muscle and muscle alignment type issues,” Dr. Brent Bauer, a general internal medicine physician at Mayo Clinic, said on the Mayo Clinic News Network. The clinic is currently studying Tuina as a treatment for chronic nonspecific lower back pain — one of the most common and least satisfactorily treated conditions in primary care — and the robot is part of the long answer to a short problem: there are not enough practitioners. “If the study turns positive, and we say, ‘Yes, Tuina can be a very good treatment for many people with chronic low back pain,'” Dr. Bauer said, “that’s half the population. We don’t have enough Tuina experts to even meet half the needs.”
Can a robot massage replace humans?
The question behind all of this is what massage is actually for, and whether a machine can deliver it — which turns out to be two separate questions that get conflated constantly. The physiological case for massage is well-established: regular bodywork reduces cortisol levels, improves circulation, decreases muscle tension, and activates the parasympathetic nervous system in ways that have measurable downstream effects on sleep and mood. A 2024 systematic review in PMC examining 17 observational studies found that robot-assisted massage is feasible, can be performed safely, and supports health and well-being. That is the physiological case. The separate case — whether the human element of touch carries its own irreducible value, something that cannot be mapped by a camera or encoded in an algorithm — is harder to study and probably impossible to resolve, because it depends on what you are asking the massage to do.
Dr. Bauer’s framing at Mayo Clinic is useful here. The robot, in his account, is not a replacement for the skilled human therapist; it is a supplement for a system in which the skilled human therapist does not exist in sufficient numbers. “We want the therapist to do much of the assessment and the positioning,” he said, “but then the robot can take over some of the repetitive work.” And then, on the larger question of what robotic modalities can offer medicine: “So many of our patients do not get full relief or full care if we just limit it to what we have in our conventional toolbox. It’s not replacing conventional medicine, it’s that idea of augmenting. We’re integrating the best of both worlds.”
What the robotic massage evangelists are selling, at bottom, is consistency and access — two things the existing massage industry has never been able to guarantee. A human therapist has better days and worse ones; a tired therapist at 6 p.m. on a Friday is a different instrument than a rested one at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. The robot applies the same pressure, reads the same body data, and executes the same strokes every time. Whether that evenness is a feature or a limitation is probably a matter of what you were hoping to get at the table. “This is really a glimmer of what is possible,” Litman told Fortune. He said it about his machine, but it applies with equal accuracy to the entire category — a glimmer, lit from both ends, of what the body needs and what technology is learning, slowly, to provide.
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