Even as I dread the day I’ll lastly eclipse the age of 30, I’m already effectively on my solution to being a crotchety, craggy confronted outdated cretin. I’ve handled random bouts of again ache from sleeping on many brick-like mattresses. I’ve tried some therapeutic massage remedy to cope with these points, however in all these years of spine-twitching ache, your common Sharper Image-type computerized therapeutic massage chair has by no means completed something greater than poke and prod me, at greatest, or slam synthetic knees into my tender backbone, at worst.

So right here comes BodyFriend again to the present ground of CES with its new, $9,500 extremely high-end therapeutic massage recliner known as the Phantom Medicalcare, which seems like a torture chair from a darkish, alternate dimension of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek motion pictures crossed with the entrance grill of a sports activities automotive.

Gizmodo has tried just a few of BodyFriend’s large, monstrous, and costly therapeutic massage chairs earlier than, although the corporate’s preliminary exhibiting at CES Unveiled this Tuesday was a extra subdued affair than the sales space babes it’s come out with previously. The California-based firm promised its turned this therapeutic massage chair “into a medical device.” Those working the BodyFriend sales space claimed its system scans customers’ our bodies by way of stimulation to assist relieve muscle ache. The firm additionally promoted its pulses of electro-magnetic fields to measure the physique and relieve muscle again and neck ache.

“Does it come with a kill switch?” I requested the folks manning the sales space. Maybe they didn’t hear me, however they supplied a imprecise reassurance that I might be effective.

I used to be initially nervous as a result of, getting in, I discovered my ft have been swallowed by the underside of the machine. My arms got somewhat extra latitude as they have been fitted into compressing arm rests. When the machine began working, I discovered my ft have been being compressed, then consumed. First the machine took my left arm. Then it took my proper.

The balls on the therapeutic massage machine then began their dance, arching and rubbing considerably awkward components of my physique, like the road of my extremely boney butt. The rollers attacked the balls of my callused ft and even the ends of my toes. The comfortable music enjoying from the machines audio system couldn’t drown out the laughs of my colleague as I went bug-eyed from being repeatedly lifted and dropped on the swell of the chair’s whims.

Then they requested if I wished the neck portion of the machine put in. “Sure, why the hell not,” I assumed. The neck therapeutic massage unit comes with a head strap. I discovered myself unable to maneuver most of my physique as all my limbs have been constricted by a machine that pretended to assault my drawback muscle tissue.

I wasn’t in it for lengthy—in all probability lower than quarter-hour. But when the corporate lastly pried me from the therapeutic massage machine’s jaws, I stood up and felt… precisely the identical as after I went in. With all of BodyFriend’s refined bells and whistles, I nonetheless really feel extremely underwhelmed by machine-based massages. Even extra so now, since this newest journey felt just like the machine was actually chewing me up, as if it wanted me tender for after I would finally sink into the acid-laced membrane of its Sarlacc Pit abdomen.